New York Theater Company since 2018
Welcome to Knowledge Workings Theater. Below is our blog giving updates on our work, the art of self-producing, and the theater world at large. Check out our book on self-producing, 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing and stay tuned for our new projects. – KWT
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“Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?”
Stanley Kunitz, The Layers
We cannot resist some more celebration of a life well-lived and full of giving whether it be a joyful spirit, a wise instruction, a helping hand, or just pure love. More of and on McKeever here and in his obituary here.
My ur-source on self-producing and so much more has died. Requiem in pace, frater meus
It’s March 4, the launch date of 13 Ways of Looking at Self Producing co-authored by Gifford Elliott and T.J. Elliott — me. (The 4th of March is also the day when the Unites States Constitution went into effect. ‘Ha ha ho ho hee hee’ as Tom Robbins used to say.) According to our carefully calibrated project plan, this is the day when we are supposed to send into the electronic universe our Starfleet of blurbs and come-ons even though we know most of them will end up crashing on uninterested (uninhabited?) minds or otherwise sucked into the black holes of social media. And even with that foreknowledge of the futility of advertisement, Gifford and I will launch a thousand ‘ad-ships” tomorrow. But not today, definitely not today. Because my friend of over fifty years Michael McKeever, the long-haired blond lad with the halo above in 1972, died yesterday. It’s time for praise not promotion, memorials not memes.
I want people to remember McKeever if only for a moment, and even though he was a man who deliberately parried all attempts at draping any recognition upon him. In trying to grok (a word McKeever favored from Stranger in a Strange Land, a label that fit Mac too) all of the emotions and thoughts flowing around this loss, I’m also laughing at the weird coincidence — and trust me, McKeever was the midwife of many a weird coincidence — of this death coinciding with the launch day for a book in which I offer (along with my collaborator Gifford) contemplations, lessons, and admonitions about self-producing theater. I don’t know if McKeever in his last months took a look at any of the source material for the book, which was previously blogged here. I doubt it. His nature was to stave off any mention of his many good deeds, and we made a big deal in our series out of what he taught me about self-producing and myself.
In the summer of 1972, McKeever at 22, the acknowledged and beloved hotshot of our theatrical community and my roommate in the top bunk wedged into our garret apartment, picked me to be co-producer of a touring production of Waiting for Godot. I was also to play Pozzo. Yes, the hubris of the young: a 20-year-old playing Pozzo. For those readers who amazingly have never seen Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and can’t wait for the upcoming Keanu Reeves version (not a joke), a query to AI this morning states resolutely that “Pozzo symbolizes the arbitrary nature of power and authority, as well as the meaninglessness of human roles.” Obviously, the perfect role for somebody still so wet behind the ears that I dripped. I was told, however, that I was rather good at portraying this bombastic speechifying figure. At the time, I chalked up my ease in expressing things dramatically as probably emanating from trying to get attention at a crowded, noisy, sometimes contentious, always comic dinner table as the youngest of 5 boys. (McKeever was the 2nd of 13 children out of East Falls in Philadelphia and his voice was godlike.)
Or my acting success then could be because as one ex-girlfriend of the time said that I already embodied how her study guide described the character: “Pozzo is tyrannical, cruel, focused only on himself.” Typecasting or tight acting, it really didn’t matter to me as long as people said I was good.
But nobody told me that I was good at being the co-producer of that play. And there’s good reason for that because I sucked. In the end, I did enough — barely and often badly — and McKeever did everything else not only to avoid disaster but to make the tour a success. But the most important learning of that time was not just about self-producing but about how to occupy my existence. That lesson came when McKeever had the equivalent of an after action review with me a month after we closed not in New Haven but at an all-women’s Catholic college in the leafy Riverdale precinct of the Bronx. He had kept a list of everything that was done, undone, redone, dropped, forgot, and fucked up. I sat there and took it all in. And then he asked me with that blade of a grin, “Tell me, T.J., are you running your life or is your life running you?” That, my friends, is what is known as a rhetorical question attached to a dropped mic and a hand grenade. It changed my life. He changed my life by making me see in one simple equation my misdirection. I didn’t reverse the running of my life immediately, but that’s because life is much harder and slower to turn around than an ocean liner, a starship, or a conspiracy theorist. But that navigational imperative buried in his question started my ‘coming about’, my ‘tacking’ into the winds of the world so that I could reach the jobs, marriage, and satisfaction I wanted including successfully self-producing plays less than a decade later in New York City. The lesson was so important that I enlarged it over the years in my straight jobs and taught it to execs as The Employment of Failure. McKeever had tattooed that advice on my brain: if you want to make something that matters, you start with the making, the shaping, the refinement, the education of yourself.
I came across his wisdom in the words of many others over the years especially Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey up at Harvard where their theory on adult development produced some very specific exercises in which participants question themselves on what they are doing or not doing that keeps them from achieving their stated desires. I thought it pretty cool that McKeever had figured out that principle and communicated it to me so effectively in 1972. He was much more to me and others, however, than that moment. He was a beloved brother and uncle to that McKeever brood. Mac went on to become a celebrated teacher at Girard School in Philadelphia while still acting in a variety of community theater productions. He told me that he felt better suited for a primary task of service then a profession of acting. I saw him in many plays over the years and June 2023 we got together for the 50th reunion of that production of Godot. And he still sparkled as Estragon. Now his sparkling will be in the sky. As rich as he made me with those words so many years ago, so poor I feel now at not being able to see him, to hear him in person again.
Estragon
In the meantime let us try and converse calmly since we are incapable of keeping silent.
Vladimir
You’re right, we’re inexhaustible
Estragon
It’s so we won’t think.
Vladimir
We have that excuse.
Estragon
It’s so we won’t hear.
Vladimir
We have our reasons.
Estragon
All the dead voices.
Vladimir
They make a noise like wings.
Estragon
Like leaves.
Vladimir
Like sand.
Estragon
Like leaves.
Silence
Vladimir
They all speak it once
Estragon
Each one to itself
Silence
Vladimir
Rather they whisper.
Estragon
They rustle.
Vladimir
They murmur.
Estragon
They rustle.
Silence
Vladimir
What do they say.?
Estragon
They talk about their lives.
Vladimir
To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon
They have to talk about it.
Vladimir
To be dead is not enough for them.
Estragon
It is not sufficient.
Silence
It may be hard to get past the paywall for this Wall Street Journal celebration of theater by Joe Queenan, my old friend and collaborator on four plays — Alms, Grudges, Genealogy, and The Oracle, but it’s well worth the effort. Joe enthuses (a rare occurrence) about putting on a play right now with a young cast and director and felt rejuvenated by people “who were still excited about their futures” and didn’t talk about their orthotics. 🙂
And, yes, of course, I am the old friend referenced in the first paragraph (who wears orthotics and has talked about them — they’re great and with that battered body of Joe’s from our basketball days Queenan should get some.)
I owe my 2018 return to theater after over thirty years away in large measure to Joe Queenan and I’m glad to see him succeeding with his latest effort The Counterfeit Moron, which only has one more performance left at 2 PM on March 2 at The Chain Theater as part of their Winter One Act Festival. I’m not sure if it’s sold out — the first 3 shows were — but The Chain often has last-minute walk-up tickets usually if you happen by 36 Street and 8th Avenue on Sunday. Terrific performances by friends and colleagues Ed Altman and Jasmine Dorothy Haefner as well as newcomer and star of Joe’s upcoming film Top Hate Tut Gregory Go Joe!
Chord: A straight line that connects the two ends of an arc
Many playwrights interested in self producing do not have the resources to avoid also holding down what people in the theater refer to as ‘straight job’. The phrase betrays a mindset that we also encounter; our theater work deviates from the straight and narrow, an ancient but still heard phrase indicating what the community deems as “the honest and moral or law-abiding way of life or … the correct and acceptable way of doing something.” Working in theater around the time that the phrase straight and narrow first appears — 1546, and very much in a religious context — was definitely not seen as a straight job. The Elizabethan era ‘Acte for the punishment of Vacabondes’ declared actors “vagabonds and masterless men and hence were subject to arrest and imprisonment.”) Today, the connotations of work as a playwright, actor, or producer lack that level of unsavoriness, but a straight job is still seen as something different: 9 to 5, regular, paying, maybe even benefits. It’s what many have to do in order to then squeeze into what hours and minutes remain their heartfelt desire of making theater live, to ascend the arc of a creative career.
Straight jobs are not just a reality for those in the theater. Recently, the New York Times published an inspiring obituary of Frank Auerbach, the great British painter that carried passages that many a theater person would recognize and admire.
Frank Auerbach, a Celebrated and Tireless Painter, Dies at 93
Unable to earn a living solely through his paintings until the late 1960s, he taught, worked at a frame maker, took a job at the Kossoff family bakery in East London and at one point sold ice cream on Wimbledon Common.
Auerbach’s patience and ingenuity marks the self-producing artist. He believed not only in his ability to create something worthwhile but the necessity of his doing so even though initial circumstances didn’t favor such a pursuit. Isn’t that the case with so many creators who persisted until that effort changed the circumstances?
The same tenacity is true of Swedish master painter Harald Sandberg as noted in a wonderful study of his life and work by son Hans Sandberg. Harald’s own notes describe his difficult circumstances:
“One could say that not many people who survived to tell have been as sick and sick as often as I. My entire upbringing was one large suffering. I was condemned by 3 doctors when I was 5 years old. I had a double-sided pneumonia and my fever reached Fahrenheit 107.6 (42 C) …They said that there was no hope at all. Well, I fooled them, as I often did later in life.”
Harald with his lifelong heart condition decided to be a painter, but in order to support his wife and himself took the ‘straight job’ of hairdresser and opened his own salon. Speaking of that necessity, he wrote in his diary:
“to paint … seems to be the job that I should have gone for, but I did unfortunately not have the economic means for it. I cannot, with my health, starve and fare ill because I am unfortunately extremely frail. That’s why I have tried right from start to find a way to make a decent amount of money so that I would at least be able to paint a few months of the year at a minimum.”
And there are so many other stories of straight jobs that extended to allow and even buttress the arc of creation for writers, actors, painters and other artists. The medium of expression differs but the common element is persistence. Chekhov was a doctor, O’Neill spent several years at sea, David Mamet was a busboy and a cabdriver. In this American Theater article, several contemporary playwrights talk about the reality, frustrations, and even advantage of a straight job. The author of the article, Kari Bentley-Quinn, herself a playwright holding a straight job as well, aptly makes the argument for her other dual focus colleagues :
“A lot of us work 90 hours a week or more balancing our money job with our playwriting job. What is more evidence of commitment than working so many hours and being tired all the time? If you can do that, it is because you truly believe in and love what you are doing. You are willing to do what it takes.”
What comes across again and again in such accounts is the necessity for persistence toward the goal of making theater to avoid the gravitational pull of making that straight job your only occupation. Persistence is even more critical to achieving your goals of self-producing your work.
That’s not just my opinion. One of the great advantages of my straight job arose from almost twenty years of close association with scientists studying those attributes that make us successful in any endeavor. Two of them, Ralf Schulze and Rich Roberts, demonstrated that persistence and conscientiousness were more important factors in attaining success than even intelligence. Looking at the psychological definition of conscientiousness, several of its facets will seem familiar to any veteran of working a straight job while also maintaining your creative efforts: Industriousness, Procrastination Refrainment, Task Planning, and Perseverance.
As cautioned, these valuable traits of persistence and conscientiousness in self-producers can be a double edged sword. John Dos Passos splendidly describes one difficulty that arises from applying ourselves to the straight job: that career then encompasses us. The controls of tasks and schedules, meetings and commutes control and contain while within them we display extraordinary competence. Why extraordinary? (yes, there are straight jobs through which we might sleepwalk or worse.) Artists offer the extraordinary in performance because Unlike characters in the TV show Severance, we do not shut off the other parts of our minds and spirits when we walk into the office or restaurant. We come possessing conscientiousness and, of course, creativity.
That latter quality, which includes the propensity to see connections, open-mindedness and centeredness, imagination, invention, and originality, also will surface in those workplaces often leading to requests to do more there for greater rewards. The stages of life are not inevitable, but they often involve increased expenses as we willingly take on responsibilities of partnership, marriage, and parenthood. Those needs tip our time/space scale toward the activity that is going to solve the problem of finding a bigger place to live or a better means of transport or making sure the kids are well-fed. That’s likely to be the straight job and since our resources especially our time remain finite such a calculation may reduce the amount of time available to make our art. If we add to the required hours to write a play, the additional blocks of time to
self-produce the resulting work the squeeze becomes evident, even palpable. The situation tests us. The good news is that like Frank Auerbach we can prep for and pass that test.
Yes, I think of the experience of holding a straight job and also working to self-produce a play as a test. Given my own straight job at Educational Testing Service (ETS) that I should propose this as one way of looking at life — and before people freak out I am stating plainly that it is only ONE way of looking at life — should not surprise anyone. Much to the consternation of even members of my family, I have long held that a viable and useful way of viewing our existence is as either a series of tests or just one long test. Obviously, I don’t consider a test to be inherently a bad thing.
Consider this definition of a test: “a procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something, especially before it is taken into widespread use.”
We are testing ourselves all the time as to whether we can do something, whether it is going to work out, whether its output is sustainable. That’s what Frank Auerbach did. He was testing his ability to keep up what mattered to him most, his daily painting, despite circumstances that might have thwarted another artist. Obviously, he passed with flying colors as they say. Requiem in pace, Frank.
Certainly, many people find tests of any kind stressful. Stress results when the perceived demands of a situation exceed our perception of our abilities. The stress of bending the arc of creativity to meet the straight line of the job that pays the rent can be of all varieties acute, event-based, daily, and chronic. The following very apt description by Peter James from his insightful blog Diary of a Failed Comedian fits what many creators (definitely playwrights and actors) decry, but undertake anyway because they believe (perhaps realistically) that their goals require this regimen.
“I’m glad I no longer have to be out at all hours of the night, riding the subway to different shows and open mics, attempting to grow and network my way into a functional career. I’m glad to be rid of the constant nagging sense of disappointment that comes with falling short of your goals. I’m glad I no longer have to shamelessly promote myself on social media, dying a little inside every time I press the “Share” button.”
When fatigue and disillusion take hold, creators have several choices including abandoning such pursuits all together, pausing to recharge their batteries, and/or shifting their goals to another type of creativity that has less soul killing side effects. Good for Peter James for choosing the latter and subsequently giving us his takes on that world in essay form. That reality is why this guide to the self producing experience in theater emphasizes the cost — not just financial — of such an endeavor.
“None Can say here Nature ends, and Art begins But mixt like th’ Elements, and borne like twins, So interweav’d, so like, so much the same.” — J. Denham
Playwrighting bears similarities to the ancient art of weaving. The woof are “the threads that cross from side to side of a web, at right angles to the warp.” Walter Benjamin noted the similarity: “Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.” The architectural dimension of building a play was noted by Richard Schechner who wrote that we should think of “The playwright as wright — the play being wrought from the interrelationships among all the artists.” For me with a maternal grandfather who was listed on his Irish army pension papers as a cartwright, a carpenter who makes carts and my other grandfather a mechanic who ended up running the NYC Sanitation Department’s 125th Street garage fixing garbage trucks and snowplows, thinking of the playwright as wright is personally meaningful. Playwrighting and self-producing are about building and constructing. Doing so while also working a straight job add another dimension to that enterprise.
But compartmentalizing the areas may mislead. In none of these pursuits can we focus only on the parts or the elements. We must admit to their interconnectedness: how they fit and influence each other The whole of self-producing life is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but insistent that we attend to it as a unity. All of the aspects of self-producing interweave. Breaking the experience into 13 Ways for this book is both useful and artificial. Dealing with the situation of the straight job is an example of how the totality of the experience, which as noted can be overwhelming, sends us back to employing several of the 13 Ways: self-reflection, self-care, self-esteem — yes, lots of self in self-producing. And it’s not for everyone every time. We may move in and out of that mode depending upon our circumstances.
The good news arising from our exploration of self-producing playwrights is that with the application of that critical conscientiousness they make theater. The straight job sustains and supports their creative arc. It is possible to make theater live while also making a living in other ways. What might be impossible just trying to understand everything that is going on while you are self producing. That act (like the act of its preliminary actually writing something worth producing) evokes the description of James Salter “You never know what you’re really doing. Like a spider, you are in the middle of your own web.” That means we must keep spinning and see what emerges.
In our first installment of 13 Ways Of Looking At Self Producing (following up on our introduction to this series, we focused on desire and need as essential prerequisites to a success in such an effort. There’s little sense in pursuing a self-production of your playwrighting work unless you have some measure of those two elements. But the need to self-produce continues to grow, which may turn even more playwrights and actors to self-production. The Dramatists Guild of America states that the organization has over 8000 members and not all writers of plays belonged to the Guild — although they should IMHO. Conversely, the number of theaters available to stage plays continues to wane as the New York Times reported last July. Emailing the theaters registered in the Guild’s resource directory last year recently saw a bounce back of more than one out of every five emails because those companies listed no longer existed. (Community theaters have proved hardier in that there are still 6000 of them according to AACT. While they tend to mount productions of already legitimately presented plays, you should check out their new play festival that will start to accept the next wave of script submissions on May 1st 2024.)
Theatre has always been as Tom Stoppard pronounced “a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster” but having less stages than ever is an obstacle on an entirely different level; we can’t even find that road to disaster. When Michael Paulson of the New York Times declares in the above linked article that “There is less theater in America these days. Fewer venues. Fewer productions…” this choice to self-produce seems not so much brave as obligatory; “All theater is sharing…”, Michael Hordern argued, “You share with the audience.”. As Simon Callow wrote of Michael Chekhov, “It was vital, he said, to engage with what he called ‘the will of the auditorium’, to reach out to each member of the audience and share the creative act with him or her.” Part of what is being self-produced is an audience to share in this co-creation. No audience, no sharing, and no theater.
Examples of playwrights and colleagues who felt this imperative to self-produce abound in the recent Gothamist article: they’re using basements. dining rooms, and restaurant patios. There are tips on how to produce in spaces such as outside venues and as Sebastiano Spinella of HowlRound noted, “Historically, the time in which performances took place in real theatrical buildings is relatively limited compared to the phases where the stage space was an open space: a market, a fair, a square, a street, or a churchyard.” (Even distinguished performers such as LaChanze felt the need to become a producer although she isn’t forced to resort to “loft theater” to get her show up.) In our case at Knowledge Workings Theater, self-producing though arduous at times accomplished all of our objectives starting with an enormous assist from Orietta Crispino at TheaterLab by placing our first show in TLab Shares. That meant we got to:
1) Create a new piece of theater — #maketheaterlive
2) Provide well-paying work for talented actors and craftpersons
3) Raise the profile of that same group through publicity and social media efforts so they can continue to #maketheaterlive
We notice the same imperative in groups such as The Playwright Connection (administered by Bob LeBlanc, Rachel Feeny-Williams, and Vivian Lermond)on FB: members who pursue both traditional and innovative methods to get their work before an audience. Threads may offer more leads in this area as groups such as Stage Crafts join and share info about venues; and methods, in their case in Los Angeles where theaters also close. And as we move on in this series to other aspects of self-production, that’s where our readers should come into play. Pooling our ideas about resources will give us more ideas about ways and whereabouts for our projects such as those listed in the Gothamist article like the Brooklyn Center of Theatre Research, the Brick Theater, East Village’s Frigid, Loading Dock Theatre, Feral Theatre Company, Pocket Ghost Productions New Relic Theatre, and Wet Spot. As Tad D’Agostino stated in that same article, “I have a play, I want to do the play, I’m not going to wait for everybody to give me permission to do the play — I’m going to find a space and do it.” And that may mean doing it in the street.
In Way # 3, we’ll deal with another aspect: the fear that self-produced means self-centered, but until then PLEASE comment, criticize, and/or collaborate with your own take on self-producing.
“I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.“
Leo Tolstoy
Readings help rewritings. The generous adventurous people who come to the reading of a new play help to shape its next iteration through both their reactions in the moment — laughs, gasps, silences, even groans sometimes — and what they were willing to tell afterwards. But even before the audience steps into your reading room, the actors and the director have animated the characters in such a way that the idea of the play can never be quite the same as it appeared on the page beforehand. Both groups — creators and observers — prove critical at this stage of making theater live.
At the reading of our new comedy, RETROSPECTIVE, we received a great deal of valuable feedback. At the gathering after the reading, I like to say that I consumed 3 beers and 33 opinions. The play provides an example of the role of readings and rewriting in self-producing a play. I cannot imagine any play that does not benefit from rewriting. But how does that happen in the self-producing process? I’ll show you an example at the bottom of this chapter.
“I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything.”
Kenzaburo Oe
This pdf at the end of this post constitutes the thirteenth draft of our latest play, which counting the film we made of scenes for our first play Alms is our tenth production since reentering theater in 2018. And rewriting played an important role in each of those instances, but that’s nothing unusual or new in this field.
In fact, Quote Investigator led me to one of the earliest proponents of rewriting plays: Steele MacKaye, who was a highly popular U.S. playwright and actor of the 19th Century. In July 1889, MacKaye published in several newspapers a piece titled “How Plays Are Written: They Are the Product of Study and Patient Toil”. The first line presented his thesis. Emphasis added:[1]
Plays are not written—they are rewritten.
In this lies the advantage of the creative, as distinct from the critical, literature of the stage.
One more time: “Plays are not written—they are rewritten”
Steele MacKaye
QI goes on to note that “by 1894 the saying had been reassigned to the Irish actor and playwright Dion Boucicault, and by 1903 W. S. Gilbert had been assigned a variant referring to comic operas. Yet, the earliest evidence currently points to Steele MacKaye as crafter of the statement.” Of course, others would take credit for this wisdom, which also serves as a caution to beginner playwrights: don’t think this process is like a 100 yard dash. Getting a play into its produceable form is more like an ultramarathon relay race in which you must keep passing the baton to yourself, but there are bathroom breaks.
Let’s trim that quote of MacKaye a little; Plays Are the Product of Study and Patient Toil. This is especially true for self-produced plays, and the rewriting of such enterprises differs from other development schemes for plays. As a bonus way of looking at self-producing, I argue that such work provides more opportunities for a playwright to refine their text through rewriting.
This not to demean the many opportunities to help a playwright revise their new script outside of self-producing: dramaturgs, workshops, New Play Exchange, etc. But when you are the producer of the play, your contact with others is perhaps wider and richer than it would be as someone who luckily has had a submitted script accepted for the next stage of development.
Being the self-producer in my experience rendered me more open to suggestions from actors. Why? Self-producing means self-interest squared. The calculus of how the play can be successful necessitates a collaboration that is authentic. The self-producing playwright may have even greater motivation to have each one of the actors be fully engaged. I don’t think that happens unless the collaboration is sincere, and that means the listening to, exploring of, and responding to comments and suggestions about the play must be real, true, not feigned or pretended.
That doesn’t mean that you, the playwright, will take every suggestion; that would be madness and an abdication of the duty to be the final judge of the text. But it does mean that you are in dialogue with these other artists and in doing so learning from their questions and even their complaints. Of course, one of their complaints with me is why do you write so many words? And I always say, I’m just imitating my favorite playwrights like Shaw and Shakespeare and Stoppard. I’m not pretending that I’m as good as they are, but part of what that imitation allows is the courage to let my characters run on, to luxuriate in language, maneuver in making arguments with quality and quantity. And since I have confidence in the eventual audiences that will see the finished product, I’m not afraid of all these things that are said about attention span. I’m willing to hazard that possibility. It drives me to tell a better story, one that will hold each person because they want to know what happens next. But I would be a fool not to ask others what they think about all of this.
Lucas Hnath is a massive rewriter. As D.T. Max observed in a New Yorker piece: “He can sound mystical about his creative process. At workshops, I’ve heard him say many times, ‘This line hasn’t figured out yet what it wants to become.; But he can also be stringently analytical. Playwright’s Input A should result in Audience Output B. … I asked him what he’d be looking out for that evening [of a preview], and he said that it was important that he not look for anything. He wanted to experience the play as if he’d never seen it. This, he emphasized, would be just the start of his process. “You have to watch several performances. Then take a step back and try to understand, on average, how the play works. It’s what remains consistent across many performances that tells me something useful. Tonight is one single data point.”
He hoped to next time find “a better spot” in the theatre. Another night found him in the stage manager’s office, listening to the actors on a monitor. He was rewriting their parts as they spoke.”
There are three aspects of rewriting in that story: the intuitive (This line hasn’t figured out yet what it wants to become), the analytical in checking off whether a particular line or passage elicited the desired reaction; e.g., an expected laugh, a thoughtful frown. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a paragon of effective and glorious storytelling, once said: “There’s no great art in confusing the reader.” That holds true for the audience member as well, and that’s the third aspect evident in the passage on Hnath above; he is rewriting in the booth as the actors speak their lines because he is sensing where the audience is finding meaning or getting lost, which is different than the analytical look in which he keeps score of whether the reactions were what he planned. This third look arise from his wanting “to experience the play as if he’d never seen it.”
At least, that’s my take. The next time (first time!) I run into Lucas I’ll factcheck my interpretation and let you know.
“Frankly, I also don’t want to have to listen to everybody’s views since, based on an ignorance of the overall text, they are only going to be prejudices anyway. Of which, with this subject, there are too many already.”
David Hare, Acting Up
Before I move on to the planning and unfolding of the reading that will lead to this rewriting, we should hear another take that of David Hare whose book Acting Up is one of my holy texts about how theater and specifically performance really work. From the above quote, you might get the sense that David doesn’t use as many people as aids in his rewriting as we did in this reading. (I do not know Hare either, but I consult his book so often it seems like we would be mates over a pint.) But in that same book, he tells a story about how Louis Malle influenced his playwrighting that describes ne way of rewriting that offers many advantages:
“Louis (Malle) shared my fascination with techniques of storytelling. Once, we were meant to be working together on Damage, the film of Josephine Hart’s novel. But I came into the restaurant for supper usually dissatisfied with that morning’s readthrough of the play of mine called Murmuring Judges. ‘It ought to bloody work,’ I said, ‘and it doesn’t.’ At once Louis asked me to tell him the story of the play. Together we sat for three hours, refining the narrative. Louis isolated every component of the story, and then put them all back together again in the right order. It was like watching a great car mechanic lay out the pieces of an engine on a clean white cloth before reassembling them. He did it for the sheer intellectual pleasure.… (After writing the synopsis of Damage) Every morning he would make me sit down under the vines and go back to the beginning of the story. He did it so many times that I thought I was going to go mad.”
That’s a rewriting occasion at the synopsis stage! You’ll figure out your own way, but if you’re self-producing starting with a reading makes sense for at least four reasons:
$$$: Attendees at a reading might be backers. Such a strategy requires a whole separate chapter.
Marketing: Readings aid this phase of self-producing because through that event you get photo ops, the start of word of mouth, and possible blurbs (e.g., “this is the best work yet from this playwright“; yes, someone said that at our last reading, which made me wonder what was lacking with the earlier plays). Reading attendees may be your repeat customers; If they liked it at the reading they will often be curious enough to return for the full production.
Given the theme of this chapter, the focus here is on the last two items on the list: Shaping and Exploring. We quote Hilton Als all the time to distinguish between the text and the play:
The reading represents the first chance to see what happens when actors speak that text in front of an audience. You realize what’s too long, too short, really funny, really NOT funny. You get the idea. Singer’s dictum becomes critical: is the audience confused; you can tell a lot by looking at faces and listening to breathing. Allan Gurganus notes that, “A crucial verb for writers is revise. Which means, of course, to re-see.” The re-seeing that happens here is quite different than the first seeing that spun out in your mind’s eye. As you re-see, you begin to reshape: lines bend, passages disappear, images appear or disappear.
To re-see, you must engage a director actors who will bring your text to its best possible life at this point. You connect to a director who can make the storytelling consistent and as potent as one can manage in front of music stands with no set. This exploration requires actors who have ideas based upon your primary text, notions about their character’s backstory, relationships with other characters, even the cadence of the language that you gave to them. Their questions about moments that are unclear to them or ways in which the structure seems not to work given their new understanding of the story.
Even before these conversations or rehearsals occur with the actors and your director, other preparations for the reading happen: getting a space, sending out scripts, etc. But the most important of these preparations is to gather an audience that likes theater. To paraphrase Singer; there is no great benefit in torturing yourself by inviting to your Chekhovian comedy an audience of people whose usual entertainment diet is thirty second TikTok parodies.
There is the usual housekeeping to address: pick a time that is convenient, send invites that are inviting and grateful, offer directions and cautions if your venue happens to be down a flight of crumbling steps or has a funky buzzer system to get in the front door. Make sure there are enough chairs and music stands. Be prepared to find the bathroom key and make sure there are paper towels there. Every detail increases the comfort of this audience and you want them in a good mood to focus on your play.
We recommend a place for an after-reading gathering. Make it comfortable and convivial. Work that room to get reactions and note them in your phone or on paper. Then consider them in the next few days because not all of them will be useful. After all, this is still your play and you need to decide which of those comments and reactions will help the story versus what will harm it or make it a totally different work.
“Everything is there in the sauce; it just needs to simmer.”
B. Huvane
The forty people who DID come to the reading only had this context about the subject of the play:
Retrospective concerns a famous painter who may or may not be dreaming of an encounter with his first wife amidst a retrospective of his work and the appearances of others from his past.
With that sparse framework, the rest of this chapter will offer examples of the rewriting. Knowing the whole play is not necessary to appreciate the learnings that the reading produced for us.
If you have the luck to persuade some people with experience in the theater as producers to attend your reading, then you are very lucky indeed. And I must claim humbly that status as at each of my readings experienced Off-Broadway, Broadway, and West End hands have attended and offered substantial constructive reactions. But I’ve also gained critical ideas from causal theatergoers who wanted to see what a new play reading was like. Having this variety is an advantage: listen to everyone. That’s particularly important for self-producers as we need all the support we can muster.
One of those old hands was lavish in his praise of RETROSPECTIVE based on the reading, but wondered what it would be like if the main female character addressed some of her bouts of confusion directly to the audience. I found this compelling and thus our opening notes reflected this change. Will it stick as the play moves to production? Impossible to tell, but whoever reads it next will have the advantage of this context.
Having sat in on the three pre-reading rehearsals, I didn’t need anybody to tell me that the play was too long, but several people did so anyway. You have to develop listening skills; hold the play at arms length for good perusal, don’t let the play hold you. Don’t take criticism personally. A common theme ran through those kind but ‘cutting’ comments: get the secondary female character on to that stage sooner. In fact, one of the people who told me that was the actress who played the secondary female character who is also a collaborator with two of our previous plays. Trusting her, we realized that there was too much business around the beginning and as you can see from the image below of the first page we cut, cut, cut as if this was a slasher movie.
And cut some more…
Rewriting is not just about cutting. Paying attention to the audience lets you know that their attention flags at times. One cause of this is excessive wordplay. In the change pictured below, the shift to emphasize one character’s discomfort with his reflexive taunting of the other combines with her need for ‘the right word’ as a poet. We are still establishing their identities and relationship, but that must happen economically.
Some of the many changes made are like Hnath’s analytical takes described above: Input A (a joke in this case) did not get Output B (a laugh from the audience). So we swapped in other repartee that should work better.
Our goal became losing ten minutes of runtime, which with this 14 point font means ten pages. One way to do that is to look scrupulously at how you can have more show and less tell in the exchanges and action. The cuts below resulted form that feedback.
A pleasant surprise from the audience reactions in the reading was the enjoyment expressed for the poems written and read by the main female character, Pippa. In this case, rather than cutting, we decided to expand one of her poems a little bit. This had the dual advantage of clarifying her personality through her poetry and also allowing the audience more chuckles at these rhymes. Nothing wrong with chuckles in this play.
Two motives manifest in this next illustration of rewriting. The first one is familiar to any writer and was initially offered by a literary savant with a wonderful name for a comic character: Arthur Quiller-Couch. In his still highly relevant book, On The Art of Writing, Q, as he was known, advised, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” Rewriting may involve multiple murders. The one below was justified because a) we need to cut 10 minutes and b) it’s a clever digression that the character, the acerbic critic self-named Z, doesn’t need as by this point everyone knows she is devilishly clever .
One last example of the changes made is a confession to a weakness. I think most playwrights have conversations with their characters or at least become eavesdroppers on such dialogue. In a first draft, the talk goes on and amuses the playwright. But a reading reveals the prosaic nature of some of those exchanges. Cutting them makes things move and that is necessary to have your audience be moved. That’s what happened here.
And with decisions like that, we cut our ten minutes. The process isn’t over, but the shape of the play satisfies, and its overall idea now has passed a test. Self-producing gave us both additional input and added urgency for our rewrite. Want to see for yourself how it turned out? Click on the PDF below and read through the current version.
And, yes, we’re always interested in having talks with folks who want to be producers or co-producers or investors helpng Knowledge Workings Theater get this play out in front of more audiences. The reading? The rewrites? The capturing of the lessons from self-producing? It’s all about pursuing our impulse, following our motto: make theater live.
Seriously, we want everyone to know that Internet Archive has uploaded a dozen Mickey Mouse shorts that are now public domain.
Enjoy!!!
Top (l-r) Gifford Elliott [Director], T.J. Elliott [Playwright], Jeremiah Alexander [Clint]
Bottom (l-r) Kat Reeve [Pippa], Jasmine Dorothy Haefner [Z], Daniel Thompson [Rory]
And so it begins: fine actors working with an astute director starting the transformation of text to performance, figuring out how to make theater live. The Hilton Als quote about theater seems both instructive and inspiring:
We have a new play, Retrospective, but at this moment it’s still that primary text and even that continues to shift. After our first rehearsal yesterday, January 12th for its first public reading that will take place on January 16th 2025 at 7PM in Manhattan, our playwright, T. J. Elliott spent several hours in his hotel room in midtown Manhattan trimming and altering that text. The after effect of the reading will likely be even more editing and tightening. Past happy experiences have taught us that the quality of the audience at a first reading provides significant and actionable insights into the further development of a play. If you’d like to be part of that audience, just ping us at knowledgeworkings@elliotttj
Retrospective concerns a famous painter who may or may not be dreaming of an encounter with his first wife amidst a retrospective of his work and the appearances of others from his past. We are lucky and gratified to have Gifford Elliott directing our cast of Daniel Thompson, Kat Reeve, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, and Jeremiah Alexander. (Jerry and I first worked together as actors in 1978; Dan and I met in theatre in 1979!)
If you would like to attend what will be about a ninety minute reading, then just email knowledgeworkings@gmail.com and we will send you a Google calendar invite. If you attend, you will part of the process of production as noted in another essential quote below:
“The play does not exist in the theater as a written text until it has been absorbed in the process of production. Drama is ‘translated’ or transformed into the person of the actor — “the body of the art of the theater”, as Stark Young put it.”
Harold Clurman, On Directing
Rem tene; verba sequentur.
Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder
Cato the Elder, whose other notable quote is ‘Delenda est Carthago ‘or ‘Carthage must be destroyed!’, gives good advice for playwrights here: nail the story from spine to skeleton to full body and the dialogue will flow.
It’s appropriate guidance for a website makeover as well. The subject for us there is making theater live. And we promote that purpose through this website with its blog and other features. The new look to our website courtesy of the effort and skills of Gifford Elliott reminded us not only of all the KWT productions since 2018, but also of the story from over forty years ago that coursed through two of the KWT founders — Marjorie Phillips and T.J. Elliott — a passion to make theater live. We were lucky then to have such able collaborators and we are similarly fortunate now.
Our new design celebrates the work of our collaborators, and highlights some of our more recent moments of live theater via our YouTube channel. We hope you check out those videos and other stories as well as 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing, which will soon be available as an e-book on Amazon. Coming up in January: a staged reading of RETROSPECTIVE, a new play.
We seek producers for that play and other planned works, collaborators who wish to join us on this journey of theatre making. Interested? We’ll buy the beverage for an in-person discussion. Just email KWTto start the connection.
You did it! The house opened, the seats filled, lights dimmed, and then rose again in the proper pattern to illuminate your story and the marvelous set constructed for this occasion. The actors costumed brilliantly moved and spoke as you imagined. Well, mostly as you imagined because the direction and their own imagination have brought new layers to the work. And now if you have done the job of publicity successfully, you’ll get to read some reviews. Don’t let them affect you too much.
(While the initial premise of this series — 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing — limited the observations about the experience of playwrights putting on their own work to thirteen perspectives, we only mentioned reviews glancingly in that sequence, and their rigors, realities, and ramifications deserve more attention. This post — a Bakers Dozen plus one — corrects that omission.)
Why do I offer that advice? Foundationally, I agree with the great poet and essayist Louise Gluck about what it takes to be a writer, which she described in a somewhat negative way explaining why her own father did not become a writer:
“…my father wanted to be a writer. But he lacked certain qualities: lacked the adamant need which makes it possible to endure every form of failure; the humiliation of being overlooked, the humiliation of being found moderately interesting, the unanswerable fear of doing work that, in the end, really isn’t more than moderately interesting, the discrepancy, which even the great writers live with (unless, possibly, they attain great age) between the dream and the evidence.”
Louise Gluck
In order to read the reviews usefully, you need those qualities even the best player in the best production is going to be viewed by someone out there with access to a website as a critic as having failed or only been found moderately interesting. It is highly likely that the ‘evidence’ of the review will be discrepant with whatever you and your team held as the ‘dream’.
DISCLAIMER: my relationship with feedback on plays resides in the eccentric column. I’m not looking for opinions about the work in the same way that many of my colleagues do. It just wouldn’t work for me. Jean Cocteau offers advice that makes sense to me: “Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like — then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” My process of writing and rewriting and then rewriting again depends almost exclusively upon my ‘familiars’: team members who have been with me from even before the eight productions of Knowledge Workings Theater, actors that I know trust, and a few other friends whose taste matters to me. So, the disclaimer is that I start off differently in my encounters with reviews than many other playwrights.
But there is a significant difference between getting feedback in forms like this one or NPS and getting a review. The wisdom of Edna St. Vincent Millay comes to mind “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.” And that’s just a book that might not even have your picture on the inside flap. In the case of the self-production of a play, the situation seems to be more full frontal nudity instead of just ‘depantsing’.
Previously in this series, we cited David Mamet’s assertion that “the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience.” Reviewers are certainly part of the audience, but I believe they need a different framing in considerations of self-producing. When we heed icons like Sarah Bernhardt stating that “The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd”, we should acknowledge that there is a segmenting in the crowd. Audience members do not all come with the same mindset. There are those who know our work and have returned, there are those who only know us and finally have decided to see one of our plays, there are those with whom we are unacquainted who have come to this particular play based upon some recommendation or report, there are those who came because it was a free ticket because as a producer you are wisely papering the house in preview week, and there are reviewers. We can roughly categorize each of those groups as arriving with a different mindset and even individual peculiarities, but the reviewer’s disposition merits a more specific examination. So, scroll a little further.
Like any other member of the audience, a reviewer is going to project their own lives and experiences onto what you have written. And unless your play is Our Town, its content likely focuses on a particular dimension: families, workplaces, wars, etc. how will that work appear to audiences that have different experiences and perhaps no familiarity at all with the world of your story? Although you would already have these concerns as a playwright, you as the producer also have additional worries as to how viewers react to their work. After the first week, word-of-mouth especially in its contemporary version of posts and comments on social media platforms assumes a criticality in attracting audiences. And people do read reviews. There are dozens of little websites in the New York City metropolitan area for example that publish reviews of plays. Some of them have a specific theatrical emphasis and others or more general appealing to senior citizens or residents of a particular neighborhood. Getting reviews means getting attention, credibility, notice. But what you do with reviews is important not only for your success but also for your sanity. (Especially true for the actors reading this as Tom Briggs suggests here.)
Why impose this qualification? Because not all of the people writing reviews have a background in theater, dramaturgy, or even entertainment. Your reviewer might have spent their whole life as a dancer and political activist and your play is about the corporate world. That likely will result in a different sort of review than if your reviewer had to deal with bureaucracies because of their straight job or even just because their host organization is large enough to have such structures. Similarly, if your reviewer has spent most of their career as a financial analyst then you’re going to have that worldview seep into their opinions about your play.
Will this appearance of reviewers with limited or stilted experience matter in every situation? Probably not. Our first production, alms, which we unwisely mounted without any PR, publicity, or marketing advice didn’t get any reviews even though it sold out all of its performances. We learned from that circumstance and budgeted for the kind of consultation that does get you reviews. And in some cases, they have been uniformly positive. We still think it’s important not to pay to much attention to them.
But what if the reviews are missing the point? Our approach is simple: the only thing Iwant from a review is a pull quote. It doesn’t matter whether they like what I have written or hate it or misunderstand it. The job of a self-producing playwright is to find the most positive phrase you can and use that in your advertising. This is a long-standing practice of producers in movies and theater; check out this 1987 LA Times piece on the ploy. In fact, there was once a controversy in which the New York Times complained that quotes were being taken out of context.. (For more on David Merrick including his scheme to find people with the same names as prominent reviewers to offer their positive opinions, scroll down within this article and this one that are very good surveys of the effect of reviewers upon audience size.)
DISCLAIMER #2: I have practiced the art of the selective pull quote. (Apparently, this is not a good idea to do if your play is opening in the EU according to this 16-year-old Guardian article.) At the end of our week run, we received a review that was… less than affirming. We weren’t going to use it in marketing anyway because all of our ad and publicity budget was gone, but we did use it in a post. Nothing in the review seemed usable, but our wonderful PR guy Ron Lasko at Spin Cycle disagreed when I told him that. Here’s the review and here’s what Ron selected:
“Compelling… The strengths of the play lie in its situation, its
Show Showdown
embrace of ambiguity, and its recognition that people are, well,
people.“
Pretty nifty. And anyone who wants to read the entire review from that source can certainly get the catalogue of weaknesses that were identified. I offer this additional way of looking at self-producing in the same spirit that informed the original compilation of thirteen: we need to make theater live. That takes talent and guts. There may be reviews that are negative and yet in some way accurate, and we will learn from those along the way. But not while we’re in the process of trying to put audiences in front of our actors and vice versa. We all would to our team to do the best we can and then absorb the learnings as to how we can do better.
Practice the art of the pull-quote with your reviews and don’t let them pull you down. But do let us know what you think as a self-producing or other kind of playwright. We’d love to hear and read your considerations on this subject.
PS Here’s what ChatGPT said about our play; AI is more sophisticated than I imagined considering they didn’t actually pay for a ticket or show up even to claim a comp.
