Saturday, April 4, 2015

J.P. Shanley on theatre

So it has almost been two weeks since the quite interesting masterclass with John Patrick Shanley after a matinee performance of his new play (or rather series of short two-handers) A Woman is a Secret.  The performance was sold out, but after the show, they brought in a bunch of chairs and more people came in and sat on what had been the stage area (indeed very few people left after the performance itself).

I had thought it was going to be a discussion of how to write female characters, but that may have been a complete misapprehension on my part.  It really was a much more of a moderated discussion of his work and his approach to writing, with quite a few questions from the audience.  Fortunately (and perhaps astonishingly) there really weren't any truly cringe-worthy questions, though a couple seemed to teeter on the edge.  Perhaps it helped that this wasn't an academic audience...

It ended up going at least 30 minutes longer than planned.  Normally, this sort of casualness towards time bothers me, but I was enjoying the discussion, though this ultimately meant I didn't stop by work afterwards.

I obviously can't repeat or even recall everything he said, but he mostly focused on being as honest as possible.  That the most horrible things that one brought up from one's life was generally what the audience responded to the most, since most of them had done things just as bad.  Then he riffed a bit -- unless you're Robert Durst.  (I didn't even catch this at first.)

One of the audience members towards the end asked a bit about Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and said that it had been life-changing.  Shanley revealed in a roundabout way that it had been life changing for him as well.  He burned a first novel and sat down and wrote Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and his next play Savage in Limbo.  They were the truest things he ever wrote (up until that point).  After that, he stood up from his desk, left his apartment and his wife and never looked back.  With a bit of creative license, Shanley was getting around to the idea that the truer a work is, the better it is, and that, in his case, he usually was writing to get through a particular problem in his own head.  That is to say, he was facing some dilemma in his own life and used the drama on the page to work through it and come to a resolution and then apply it to his personal situation.  Apparently, this meant he was thoroughly unhappy with his (first) marriage and was tired of living a lie.

No question this will lead to a lot of juicy drama.  I find that I am generally trying to pin down something that mattered to me and work out what might have happened had I gone a different direction.  In another case, I am somewhat celebrating my high school days, which is more than ironic, as I was quite happy to leave them behind.  But I also seem to favor the comedic mode (Neil Simon-lite?) and that has different requirements than heavy drama.  Nonetheless, it is something to consider when trying to get these plays staged -- actors almost always prefer conflict and drama, and I have been trying to at least add more dramatic tension where possible.

One thing that Shanley said caught my attention, and that is that everyone sees the same play differently, so, for instance, if there is a deathbed scene with a father, everyone will filter that through their own experience or their imagined experience if their father is still alive.  And their own relations with family will influence whether they go along with the scene or resist it, if it doesn't ring true to their own experiences.

Shanley discuss the impossibility of knowing much of anything at all in an ontological sense, and the complete impossibility of really understanding another person, and yet social life requires us to act as if this were possible, or all exchanges (and society writ large) would grind to a halt.  He didn't quite use those terms, but that was what he was getting at.  Indeed, that was almost entirely what Doubt was about.  (Not surprisingly Doubt came up several times.  This has never been a play that interested me that much, but what I did find interesting was Shanley's throwaway comment that often the best plays on stage don't translate well to film.  He admitted that Proof was a bigger Broadway hit, but that Doubt had far more impact as a movie.  Not that having Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman didn't help a lot...)

There was quite a bit of discussion of the casting process and how he really preferred actors who would engage and work with him, since he was often changing things up until the last minute (and sometimes even after opening night!).  At the same time, he was willing to take cues from the actors and rewrite lines until they became more true, which is something to which actors tend to respond well.  I've even done this a bit, though obviously at a totally different scale.

He encouraged playwrights to just get the stuff out there, and not work 10 years on a play.  There were always hungry actors who would perform new works, so that there could be an audience for a play.  Plays absolutely require an audience so that the author can really know what he or she has.  I hope I find this (eager actors) as true in Toronto as it was in Chicago.  I think it is probably true, given what I have seen at Sing for Your Supper.  It's definitely something I will explore as I finish the edits on some of my longer plays.  The importance of just writing new material all the time (and not obsessively rewriting one play) also came up in this interview he did with the Toronto Star, so I guess his advice is consistent at least.

I think that covers a great deal of what I found helpful.  Shanley did say that most of the time, he simply wrote plays from the first act to the last, though sometimes he did write the climatic scene and then tried to work backwards to ensure that the play as a whole had "earned" that scene.  The playlets in A Woman is a Secret were written at a time when he had just completed some other work and was facing the dreaded blank page, and he just wanted to go back to basics and drill down until he found some core emotional truth and then he would move on to the next one.  I have to admit that I haven't listened to the entire radio interview yet,* but it sounds like it is mostly concerned with the power struggle between men and women in a relationship that he laid out in A Woman is a Secret -- and yes, to the aggrieved annoyance of at least one hardcore feminist reviewer, the relationships in the play are resolutely heterosexual, though he has written (perhaps not completely convincingly) about other kinds of relationships in other of his plays. 

I found it sort of amusing that he kept referring to his death bed, and that he often asked himself would he want to do this or that thing, and would he find himself regretting no doing it on his death bed.  This generally encouraged him to go out and do more social activities...

He's certainly quite a pro, though I thought he generally doesn't descend into glibness in his plays, which is something that long-time professionals do have to watch for.  It looks like I've only seen a handful of his plays -- a semi-successful staging of Women of Manhattan in Chicago and A Woman is a Secret.  Apparently, I missed The Dreamer Examines His Pillow 2 years ago when it was remounted in Toronto, and this past fall there was a good production in Vancouver!  I suspect I did have a chance to see it in Chicago but passed.  I don't believe I've ever had a chance to catch Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.  That is actually going to be going up in Montreal in early May, but I just can't see making two trips there in such a short time (and I am just not sure the play merits traveling quite so far to see it).  Well, that will probably come back to Toronto or somewhere nearby in the next few years.

The last nuggets that are of interest were that Shanley fully understands the reality of today's Broadway economics, which means 3 or 4 people on a fairly simple set.  The problem comes when then trying to sell the play to amateur or semi-amateur groups outside of New York that actually want plays with large casts.  But you can't get these plays published by French or DPS because they weren't on Broadway.  Quite the Catch-22, though Shanley himself doesn't have to worry about getting the attention of DPS (the huge success of Doubt has seen to that).  Finally, he talked a bit about directing Joe Vs. the Volcano and the random way that came about.  What he said was quite interesting, and that was that most directors are actually in a conversation with other directors and other films, and that wasn't what he was about.  He just wanted to direct his script and not reference a dozen other films, and yet that meant most of the other people in the film industry considered him a total hack.  I think it is quite possible that theatre is even more self-referential than movies, but it manifests itself in different ways.

All in all, it was a very interesting and even moderately useful session on a very cold Sunday afternoon.

* Several of the issues that he covered in the master class are pretty well distilled in this 20 minute interview, so it is definitely worth checking out, even though the interviewer was really hung up on the whole Shanley (as a man) does or does not understand women trope in a way that was a bit limited, compared to the master class, though obviously he had more time to stretch out on Sunday.  I suspect it will be up for a year or two.

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