On Staged Readings

Max Sparber has a great post with advice for playwrights when having staged readings of their work.

Last year, I had two readings of the script I’ve written, one relatively informal, and one formal, and his words really ring true. I have been involved in more staged readings than I can count as an actress, and I have also participated in the Playwright/Directing Unit at the Actors Studio (a tedious task at times, but unbelievably useful for the playwright) and all of this prepared me, to some degree, to how it would feel being on the other side of the process. My concerns were different. As an actress in a staged reading, my only responsibility is to the playwright, to speak the words clearly (staged readings are usually about having the script be heard, it’s a work in progress), and to commit to what is going on in the script to the best of my ability while holding script in hand. I am off the hook in a staged reading, as an actress. That’s part of why they can be so fun. But when it was MY work being read, I paced in the back of the small performance space like a tiger, listening carefully to audience reaction, trying to FEEL what was happening between the molecules in the room: did that joke land? If it didn’t get a laugh, why? There are many reasons why, and you have to take them all into account. Maybe the actor, who is reading, after all, bumbled the line a bit. Or maybe the line isn’t funny. All bets are off at that point. You have to consider everything. You have to be at the very same moment: detached and attached.

It was exhilarating, and nervewracking, and I was so happy when it was over. It was illuminating, too: we had a QA afterwards, pretty informal, but what ended up happening was so helpful for me in moving forwards with my writing. I got the same comment from multiple people about the female character. There were questions. People were intrigued, don’t get me wrong, but there was a sense that there might be a lack of clarity there somewhere. I also have a dreaded fear of being too obvious, which can keep me from saying what I mean, and this is something I need to work on. I have been reading Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day’s Journey Into Night over and over these days, basically to remind myself how it is done, and although there are still mysteries in the characters, and I could talk about Blanche and Mitch and Stanley and Mary Tyrone all day long, there is never any doubt that the playwright knows what story he is telling. Tennessee Williams is not afraid to be clear. The last scene of Streetcar is a masterpiece. If you had held out any hope at all that Blanche could be saved, Williams disabuses you of those fantasies in a scene that is, what, 2 pages long? That’s economy, that’s clarity. It helps me to read those scenes again, those climactic scenes that work, to remind myself to not be afraid to put it all out there, to say, in no uncertain terms, what I mean. So when I got numerous comments about the female character, all along the same lines, I do remember thinking, “Okay, gotta look at that section … something’s not working there.” An example of being both detached and attached. I am still amazed at myself that I was able to be in that space, because all I felt, inside, was ATTACHED.

As Max writes:

Ignore individual answers, as there are audience members out there who manage to get bewildered by The Family Circus, but pay attention to the answers as an aggregate. If there are areas of the play that confuses a number of people, it’s probably actually confusing.

Yup. You have to know what to take in and what not to take in, but at the moment of the staged reading, it is best to keep your mouth shut and listen to everything. Do not defend. Do not defend. State what you were going for, and then shut up and hear people respond whether they got it or not.

One great thing that came out of it was that I had written into the script the Pauses I wanted the actors to take. I guess I think I’m Harold Pinter or something. David (the actor) asked me if I wanted them to follow the Pauses to the letter, and I said, “For this purpose, yes. Let’s see how it plays. And don’t add more pauses. Just do the ones I wrote.” WELL. Within about 15 minutes of the reading, I thought, “I can lose about 50% of these pauses.” I had over-paused, basically. It was immediately apparent that I could lose most of them. Too many. It made the script sag. Pinter can do it, but that’s because he’s a genius. I went nutso with the pauses, and now need to pull back, and let the dialogue just play. That was a great thing that came out of the reading, something that nobody even commented on, but it was just a Note to Self. ENOUGH with the pregnant pauses! That’s what a reading is for. You have to put it out there, without second-guessing, and be willing to take a good hard look at what doesn’t work. In front of people. Not for the faint-hearted.

Over the weeks following the second reading, I had email conversations and actual conversations with people who had been there, who fleshed out for me some of their thoughts about the script, and again, that was so helpful, because first of all it helped me see that in some cases I was actually onto something, and then, in other cases, it helped me see where I was 100% NOT clear about what I was trying to say. And, in some cases, it helped me actually see that I didn’t know what the hell I WAS trying to say, and I needed to get clear MYSELF.

If you find yourself talking too much, if you find yourself going on and on about what is “going on” in a certain scene, that that is a pretty sure sign that you have no idea what actually is going on. You should be able to boil it down and sum it up in a sentence. You can boil down Act III, scene 1 in Hamlet into a sentence and that scene is one of the greatest achievements in Western literature. The theme, the objective, is clear, in almost every line. It’s not muddy or complex. You don’t need to talk and talk about it. “Do I want to live or do I want to die?” Hamlet wonders. That’s it. I’m talking as an actress and a member of the show-trash community here, NOT academia, an important distinction. People can write theme papers on it to their heart’s delight, but in terms of drama, the action of the scene is as simple as can be. So any time I found myself babbling on and on about this or that moment, I knew that I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Most of my friends are actors, so they speak in actor-terms, and I found their comments to be the most intuitive, the most clicked-in. They weren’t jargony or academic (as mentioned by Sparber), but emotionally based. If something doesn’t make sense emotionally, then an actor will be the one to tell you why. Because that is their business. They truck in emotions. This is not about being obvious or literal. Usually it is the more academic types who want something more literal. After all, there are moments in Women Under the Influence where Gena Rowlands doesn’t behave in a way that makes sense, perhaps, dramaturgically, it might look weird on the page, but on a deeper level, a soul-level, it makes more sense than any performance before or since. That is part of what I was going for with some of my transitions, and so I really needed to listen, and listen closely, to those who said they didn’t get it, or those who said they got it completely. Again, you have to be able to listen. And then decide what to do.

Max writes:

Once you have had a few responses that are really useful, though, you’ll start to recognize them. They tend to produce a sort of “Aha!” moment. They make instant, intuitive sense, and may actually cause you to see your own writing in an utterly new way. They tend to take the form of a very specific comment about the script you wrote, such as, “It seems like the main character of your play is actually …” or “For me, the moment of the greatest dramatic interest was …” You hear these comments, and think, My God, that at actually is the main character, and that actually is the dramatic climax of the play!

I had mentioned in the QA that the scene I had been most concerned about, the one I had worked on the most, was the climax to the first “act” (although it’s really more of a big SCENE, made up of little fragmentary other scenes), which I called “the Baby on Board Scene”. I was tormented by that scene. I had a clear idea in my head of how it had to PLAY, but then that means that it must, it must, exist like that on the page. I worked it to death. But it wasn’t until I heard the two wonderful actors read it that I could really get a sense if I had succeeded or not. One of the people there said to me afterwards, “It was in the Baby on Board scene that I suddenly started not liking her. I started feeling worried for HIM, and like he should cut his losses and get out. I was with her up until that point, and then I turned on her.”

I thought to myself: “YES!”

And this was a woman making that comment, which had been another concern of mine. One of my explicit (unstated) goals in that scene was to have women, who might have been “rooting” for the female character, abandon her to her own demons, and switch sides. I hadn’t said that out loud in the QA session, I hadn’t told anyone, but when I got that comment, about one of the most re-written and edited scenes in the piece thus far, I knew I had done what I had wanted to do, and knew I didn’t need to edit at least THAT scene anymore.

I haven’t touched it since.

I won’t be shy and tell you that the scene played like a bat out of hell. It killed. It was the most successful scene of the entire second reading, the one that that generated the most organic response. I don’t know what it was like for the actors, but it felt, to me, watching, that all they had to do was say the lines, and the thing landed. Standing in the back, I was gauging the energy of the room the entire time like a crazy barometer. I had been so worried about the scene that there was a hunkering-down feeling in me, like: “Okay. Don’t just listen to the words. Be totally present, 100% right now, so you can see how this damn thing plays.” I had a specific idea in my mind of the arc of the scene, which comes out of the scene before. The scene before ends on a hopeful note, a moment of conciliation, where the female concedes ground, and the two have a loving moment. The next scene (the scene in question) opens mid-argument. The argument goes, without let-up, until the very end of the scene, when he (I hoped) demolishes her with a monologue about what is wrong with her. My hope for it was: the audience would already be invested in the couple, rooting for them, and the scene before leaves them hopeful, hopeful that this nice man will make it work with this weird prickly OCD woman. I wanted to start mid-argument to dash the audience’s hopes INSTANTLY. The two argue for a bit, and then it becomes clear what they are arguing about. The Baby on Board signs. (It all makes sense in the context of my female character, who lives life like it is an ideological war on all fronts). I wanted that to be funny, hilariously funny. I wanted to set it up that the audience thinks they are arguing, at first, about something that might be reasonable for a young new couple to be arguing about: she flirted with someone else, or he didn’t call when he said he would … but then, when it becomes apparent, that they are in a rageful argument about the Baby on Board signs – I wanted that to be funny. Get a huge laugh, basically. (This was my main #1 fear: that it wouldn’t get a laugh.) I wanted the argument to rollick along, and I wanted the audience to find it all funny – almost like they are relieved. “Oh, they’re just arguing about that … that’s kind of silly … I can relax …” But then, at a specific point, I wanted the audience to go: “Uh-oh.” By that point, there are only 2 pages left in the scene. I didn’t want to dwell on it, or hammer it home 10 times. I wanted there to be a feeling of dread, and of incomprehension, that she would be so unreasonable, that she would be willing to throw away this romance because of a disagreement about the Baby on Board sign, of all things … and then, boom, it’s over. He’s had it. He’s done. She has revealed herself to be an unworthy mate over the course of the scene, and he’s out of there.

So. That’s a lot to get into one scene, and that’s some pretty subtle maneuvering that has to take place. I only write about this at length because it is a moment I am quite proud of, and it is important, in times of difficult work and struggle, to remember the moments that worked. It helps me (to quote Lorna in Golden Boy), “stiffen the space between my shoulder blades”. You need that when you are trying to work. As you can see, I had a specific experience I wanted to create, and if it was great on the page but didn’t play that way for the audience, I’d have to re-work. And literally, every transition I just mentioned above is what I could feel happening in that audience. They rode the wave. The actors were more like conductors. They played the shit out of the scene. They played it real, they played it heartbreaking, and the result, out in the dark seats, was tense silence at first, dismayed, then HOWLS of laughter that continued on for a couple of pages, just waves and waves of guffaws, every time my female character said the words “Baby on Board sign”, the laughter would get more intense. And then, at the moment I had planned (and this is credit to the actors, too, who just went there, talented geniuses that they are), I could feel the energy shift. People stopped laughing. People pulled back. They realized that a disaster was unfolding. It was funny and then …. it was not.

We weren’t out of the woods yet. We still had the whole second act to go through, but that “Baby on Board” scene had been my main concern. If you don’t get THAT, then you don’t get any of it. The rest will NOT follow. Because then it will seem like he has over-reacted and fled into the night over a stupid trivial argument. But that was not the story I was telling. You need to finish that scene thinking, “Well, that sucks, but I think he did need to escape that. He clearly couldn’t have dealt with that.” If you end that scene thinking, “Boy, did he over-react”, then I have failed.

There is nothing like the thrill, quiet and sure, when you know … you KNOW … you have succeeded.

The comments I got at the QA confirmed my feelings about that scene, and also deepened my understanding of what I hadn’t done in some of the other scenes. There were issues I needed to take seriously. “Why does he call her and ask her out to dinner?” That was a big one. I am still not sure I have handled that one appropriately, and I am still working on it. What does he want from her? If my answer requires me to talk for 15 minutes, then it’s not a good answer. Objectives need to be short and to the point.

To quote my acting mentor Sam Schacht:

Every scene is either Fight or Fuck. If you’re ever stuck and you don’t know how to play something, then just make a choice, either way, and see how it goes. Fight or Fuck. See if it gets you anywhere.

It might be possible to count just how many times I think of his words in my life when I’m trying to create something, but I doubt it. It comes up for me constantly. There are, naturally, subtleties … but when you’re stuck? Trying something subtle is never the way to go. William James wrote:

To change your life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.

The same is true with acting, with writing. If I’m stuck, the last thing I need to do is try to make a subtle measured change. Fight or Fuck, man. Fight or Fuck. Choose.

Try something unexpected, something sudden, as sometimes happens in real life. People are surprising. See how your characters would react to a surprise. Don’t assume you know. Those people on the page might surprise you if you just let them.

I am talking to myself right now. It helps. Don’t assume you know, Sheila. Let them surprise you. See what happens.

Oh. And don’t be afraid to say what you mean. Ever.