Back to my roleplaying roots

Inspired by Flux Theatre Ensemble's BARP (Big Artistic Risk Project) and Howard Shalwitz' TCG post about theatrical innovation, I've finally decided to put pen to paper about the sort of production process I want.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I want a production process that goes back to my roots in roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, and so on. I come from a background where the only thing I needed to build a world, develop a story, and/or make a character were a few sheets of paper, a book, some dice and my own imagination.  I could enhance the experience with costumes and props, but I never needed them to feel fully invested in the setting, the story, or my character.

I love how, in roleplaying games, the act of exploration itself (through playing the game) organically gives rise to coherent characterization, narrative, and aesthetic. None of these things are truly determined beforehand. Sure, the Game Master (GM) may give you an idea of some of these things, and you can read about a lot of it online or in a rulebook. But it isn't until we start playing that those things really start to take form and come together.

I love the sheer freedom of roleplaying games. I love the fact that I don't have to wait to be given permission to bring something that enhances the game (music, pictures of people and places, props, even food!).  Even more than that, I love it when doing so inspires the other players to do likewise. In my favorite games, there was a jazzy vibe where each player brings something different yet essential, and we're constantly riffing off each other, just taking what each person offers and going with it.

The time commitment for a roleplaying game is also fairly manageable. It's not unusual for a group of roleplayers to meet every week and play for 3-4 hours. This could go on for months or years. I'm not talking about people who have no lives outside of roleplaying. I'm talking about people who often have families and full-time jobs that require their care and attention. For them, it's relatively to commit long-term to playing every Tuesday evening for the next five months. Much easier than, say, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening for the next five weeks.

I want to get back to that. Or, to be more precise, I want to bring more of that into making theatre.

This cannot work with the way theatrical productions in NYC usually happen. The key elements that need to change are the division of labor and the time commitment.

I'll address the time commitment first because that's easier.

I'd rather do one two- to three-hour session every week for six months to a year than cram everything into 3-4 months of frantic activity. To me, it's like the difference between microwaving a can of soup and making soup from scratch and putting it in a crock pot. With more time to simply breathe, would more nuances in texture and flavor emerge?

I also want a process that lets go of expected results. Nobody begins a game knowing exactly what's going to happen by the end. So, I don't want to determine from the outset if this process would lead to a staged reading, a workshop, or a full production. It'll definitely lead to something, but I want to tailor the results to the process rather than vice versa. Let's say that the group commits to six months of weekly meetings. If, at the end of that, a fully realized performance is the next step, that's what happens. If a staged reading is where it's at, that's what happens. If it's something in between, that's what goes next.

Another aspect of roleplaying games that I want to see more of in theatre is blurring the line between audience and participant. In roleplaying games, the audience and the players are one and the same. While theatre often plays with the fourth wall (mostly by dragging them into the play somehow), I'd love to simply have a play where the characters are doing what they do while the audience itself forms part of the scenery somehow (as trees, a faceless mob, a flock of birds, people on the street, watchful spirits from beyond, or some such), and the actors treat it as such.

Now, I want to be clear that this wouldn't mean six months of navel-gazing and twiddling thumbs then getting to the "real" work of putting on the play (learning lines, blocking, etc.). It would still involve much of the same stuff as rehearsals and production meetings. The only differences are that: 1) everyone is involved from the outset, and 2) it becomes part of the rehearsal process rather than separate from it.

The way it usually happens in theatre is that the performance and the production are treated separately. So, you have the cast doing actor stuff while the crew does designer stuff and production stuff. And then there's the director who's trying to hold it all together with the help of the stage manager and maybe an assistant director. Not to mention the producer who's trying to keep it all under budget.

For the scope I prefer to work with, this seems inefficient and arbitrarily limiting to me. To me, it matters less who does what than that it gets done. That is, if it needs to get done at all. (Personally, I believe there's something to be said about exploring what can be done with nothing but performers in a space before putting a lot of time and effort and money into hiring a designer.) Even when choosing a designer, it always struck me as strange that their work gets done in isolation rather than in collaboration with the people who are most directly impacted by those design decisions.

I suppose that the general principle would be to add more to the production as the need arises. I'd start with the essentials: actors, text, an empty space. Everything else would be added once we see a need for it and not a moment before. For instance, a designer would only come into the picture if no one has ideas, if no one can agree on anything, or if something needs to be made that no one can make themselves.

This reflects the setup of the roleplaying games I've been a part of that all start with players, rules, and a place to play.

The trade-off for all this freedom and input is more responsibility for the production as a whole. Everybody does script analysis. Everybody does marketing and publicity. Everybody contributes ideas for the set, props, costumes, etc. Granted, there may be people who have the final say on these things, but the process of actualizing a performance is shared by all.

You don't need to know why

Why did you write this?

Why Anne Hathaway?

Why does this character say that thing on page whatever?

As a playwright, I get a lot of "why" questions from actors and directors. I usually answer them because I know people are curious and want to understand where my work is coming from. Sometimes, though, it puts me in the position of explaining or defending my artistic choices rather than exploring or illuminating what's going on in the play I actually wrote.

Yet, in the rush to psychoanalyze me through my play, I often wonder if what gets lost are the things that transcend the psychoanalysis. Rather than expanding and enriching my creation, it shrinks it and dries it up. It makes it easy to dismiss the story and the characters as mere symptoms of my own neuroses as opposed to being reflections of a greater truth.

Here is the irony: in this drive to answer all questions except the most essential ones, you can actually undermine the truth of my work.

This is why I'm such a big fan of Practical Aesthetics. It takes the focus off of what's going on in my head and puts it where it belongs: making choices about what's happening on the page. What's happening right here, right now? What this character trying to do in this scene? What does it mean if they do or don't?

Everything else is either something I can't say, something I refuse to say, or something that doesn't need to be said.

I would love to be part of a process that allows me a chance to sit with the director and actors and use Practical Aesthetics to do a scene analysis of every scene in the script. That would be amazing. That would go further in creating a rich, textured performance of my play than any number of questions aimed at excavating all my secrets or summoning all my demons.

Gestating the writing process

The piece I'm gestating now has taught me that I don't write plays so much as give birth to them. And it frustrates me to no end. I am creatively bloated and sluggish, laden down with the play that's growing inside me, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it besides feed it and wait. I have nearly no say in what comes out, no input as to when it will happen. I only feel the stirrings in the murky darkness of the metaphorical womb. It frightens me a bit.

It's eerie just how embodied my process is, how closely it parallels the cycles of my body. Most of the stuff I write, fertilized as it is, never takes root and gets ejected from my system like so much menstrual blood. The plays that take hold, the ones that eventually become my children made of words, often have difficult births. There is always pain because I am pushing out a truth I am not big enough to express, threatening to split me in two. With every piece, there is the fear that this is the one that will finally kill me. Yet once I'm in labor, I cannot desist. It must come out, even if I die afterwards.

And when it's over, I hold my baby of paper and pixels. Did I do this? Did this come from me? It can't be. It's wrinkly and slimy and more precious than anything in the world. I clean it off, make it look somewhat more human. I let it feed off my dreams and memories. I watch it grow.

Tulpa, or Anne&Me is a lively toddler now, having taken its first steps last year and progressed to running around. I am amazed by it even as I fear for its future, for the world I brought it into.

Pregnant again, I am waiting for the new piece to take shape, to tell me its name. I had my own ideas, but the play inside me rejected them. I remind myself to let go of trying to control it. Just feed it and wait. I am always hungry, and my cravings are strange.

I envy those with the gift of clarity. What is it like to create something as an act of will? What is it like to choose what comes out of you? To have a say in what and when and how? What is it like?

More on process

Another word about process. It's not normal for me to work in a linear fashion. My initial drafts look like bits of action, image, dialogue, plot, theory, and stray thoughts floating on a sheet of printer paper. From this raw material I forge something that resembles a scene. One of my weaknesses as a writer is my tendency to stall if I don't have everything in figured out ahead of time. I also have a habit of wanting to perfect one scene before moving on to the next. It induces a kind of paralysis in my writing, where I'm doing the same scene over and over again because I "need" it to be perfect before moving on to what happens next. As a result, I often get frustrated and down on myself then abandon whatever it is I'm working on. I think I can get trapped inside my head. I guess I need someone or something to help pull me out of that. I really want to stop sabotaging my work like this, but I'm unsure of the best way to proceed.

I suppose I should give myself permission to write about what interests me at the moment until the draft is done. So, from here on out, everything might not be in order, but it is part of the same piece.

Process

Moving right along. Looking over the last scene, as much as I like the last part, the middle is a little off somehow. I don't know. It's just that it lacks the magic of the prologue and transition scenes. The first 2 scenes make me eager to see performers pull it off, but the previous post seems sort of dry, like an instruction manual. I think I've solved the problem, but I'll post the revision later.

What I often notice about my own creative process is that my first ideas are not always my best ones. Even the scenes I posted so far aren't the first incarnations of those events - only the most recent and complete ones. Looking over the scattered notes and doodles I make, it's often a wonder I manage to put down something coherent at all. I guess that's a problem with all creative people - translating the images in your head into something that you can communicate to others in a way that reflects or enriches what you initially imagined.

Part of what often stymies my process is the feeling that I have to make the layers of dynamics and meanings I imagine at different points in time obvious to my audience. I frequently feel obligated to make everything transparent despite the fact that transparent is not my nature. From time to time I think my rewriting process is un-writing and un-editing, making room for the mysteries that were in my initial conception but often get diluted once I put pen to paper. Basically, it's usually me correcting my tendency to overdo things, to put too much energy and effort into something that doesn't need it.

I'm considering is posting my revisions as separate posts, if only to show the development from draft (and a very rough one at that) to a more-or-less finished script.

Wrote Something Today

And it's . . . kinky.

My Theatrical Kindred Spirit: Artaud

I've been devouring Theater and Its Double recently, and I think I found my "soul mate" in Antonin Artaud. I know that he's old news for a lot of Theater People, but he's new to me, and it's been thrilling to finally find someone who would "get" my work if he read it. A lot of people think Artaud is incomprehensible, but I find him quite lucid. Reading "The Conquest of Mexico" has been particularly affirming in light of the difficulties I have with writing, especially with regards to certain theatrical dogma about playwrights using didascaliae (non-dialogue text elements; aka "stage directions"). This article is a pretty good overview.

In the meantime, I found my "dolls." They're cheap little plastic chess pieces you can find at Walmart and the like. Despite the squares, it's great to have a 3-D "stage" where I can position things and have some concept of scale. Since my work will incorporate movement more than dialogue, it's pretty important to me to have an idea of where things are in relation to one another. I bought an extra set for about $3.50 to have more pieces.

I might post some of my work so far, particularly as a creative exploration of Artaud's ideas in a vein similar to "The Conquest of Mexico." I don't think my piece will be quite that short, and there may be some speaking (mostly for effect). It might be a week or two before I feel comfortable posting anything. It's not up for critiquing or review so much as exploring ways and methods of understanding and staging non-traditional texts (God, I hate that word).

Playwriting and Voodoo dolls

I wish I had enchanted little dolls that would move around like I tell them to. I have Elrond and his twin brother, Aragorn, a Nazgul and his very big brother, and Sesshoumaru. All they want to do is stage combat. If they don't get to play with swords, they're completely useless.

I wish I could afford "scenery" for them too. This would make it a lot easier to get pen to paper. I don't know why, but I have to experience something in at least three dimensions to really understand it. Otherwise, it's all kind of a fog. For instance, most painting leaves me cold. I literally don't get it, but sculpture immediately engages me. Same thing with most poetry. I just don't get it. But music without lyrics often moves me very deeply.

It's hard to describe how often I simply struggle with words, how often the verbiage just gets in the way. Maybe I'm just not a writer.