To be or not to be/Class or resources to learn about playwrighting

October 12, 2015 10:15 AM

Please recommend a good course to learn more about playwrighting and/or more resources to learn how to do so/NYC city based but open to other locations.

Background as to where I am at and what I would not like/ like in a class:

I decided to sign up for a playwrighting class at a place in Manhattan that is supposedly made by playwrights, etc., for people in the general public who want to learn more. I am phenomenally disappointed in the class. For example, we write 10-minute plays on our own during the week, read them out loud in class, and get 5 minutes on the spot feedback at most and not truly an assessment of what works/doesn't work/how to improve, etc.; we never even assess if we met the objective of the assignment and there has been 0 moments of discussion related to the craft. My expectations for a class, either in information provided, how to analyze, etc. , is much higher and I have gotten that in classes for other fields so it might be a disconnect because it is a class for the general public, or maybe it is this way for other fields, no idea.

I'm not entirely certain where to find a class that would provide more. I thought about signing up for a playwrighting course at a university level, although I need to stress that: I don't have any background in this at all (or even the arts, or humanities, or whatever), so I might not meet prerequisites/requirements; ideally, I would attend/audit, but I'm not sure if that limits access to a class; the class might be just as terrible. Do people really learn this at all from classes? Not sure if this is the best way to do so, but I thought I would ask to see if people had suggestions.

My main question:

Is there a good place to take a class or classes that would meet these parameters (provide much more information/analysis skills/real feedback and assessment of plays) in NYC and accessible to a person from the general public? If it is not in NYC, and a phenomenal course is located in ....Chicago, Portland, or somewhere else, please mention it because I am looking for another city for reasons unrelated to this question, so I could take it down the road and its not off the table.

OR are there are resources that you would recommend to learn more about playwrighting?

What I'm not looking for:

-Books like "Save the Cat" and "Story" by Robert McKee are too basic.

-Not interested in screenwriting.

What I have done so far and will continue to do:

-I do read plays (and have a large queue of more plays to read), and I tear them apart on my own to see what works/doesn't work, and I attend plays and/or listen to audioplays.

-At the moment, I find 10-minute play writing contests, etc., write something and send it off.

posted by Wolfster to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

What is the course you have taken and who is it with (Gotham Writers, something via CUNY, something like that)? That can keep people from recommending it.

Otherwise, the way the class worked is....kind of going to be what you find, generally. "Writing classes" outside of a university setting really aren't academic studies of various genres and tropes which you then apply to something; they're usually the get-an-assignment, turn-it-in, class-discussion-ensues model.

But - honestly, that's also pretty close to what you're going to get when it comes to how your play gets produced anyway. I was a literary manager for a theater company for ten years, and producing a play was rarely a "playwright pitches their play for the first time and it's perfect as it is" situation. Instead, there is copious feedback and discussion at every step of the play's development. Here's usually how it goes:

* You write your play. You send your first finished final draft to the company you're going to work with.

* They organize a "staged reading" first, where actors sit on chairs and read from scripts, and they do an all-talking, no-action performance of the play that way, once, for an invited audience (you can invite some friends, the actors invite some friends, etc.). Maybe a director has worked with them once. There's someone reading the stage direction as well. Then after the show there is a Q-and-A, which often you will be invited to come up on stage for as well, where the audience can ask questions about or give feedback on what they just saw, or point out if anything was unclear ("So....in the scene with the chicken, what was that line about pot roast about?").

* Then, you as the playwright will take all of that feedback, think about it, and go rewrite the play. Sometimes the director or dramaturg or literary manager will also meet with you a couple times to talk over parts of the play itself with more in-depth feedback. You are then supposed to come up with another draft of the play that takes all that feedback into account (not EVERYTHING everyone told you; you may decide that a couple of the points people gave you just don't matter).

* Then you do what's called a "workshop" of the play. This is kind of half a staged reading and half a performance - the actors are up and moving, but the set, costumes, props, and other tech stuff are a bit more simple. This is supposed to give you an idea whether the stage directions you've written in actually work, or whether they are technically impossible or just look stupid. There's often another invited audience, or maybe a more general audience, usually there for cheaper tickets or "pay what you want" kinds of stuff. There often will be yet more feedback from audience.

* Then you take all that feedback and write another draft. Possibly with more meetings with the director and the dramaturg and producer.

* Then you have the draft that is going to get produced for "real". But even here, you're not necessarily done revising; you are often invited to come to a rehearsal or two, to watch what the cast is doing with it. Often there are totally different actors, some of them giving totally different readings of lines. This may give you yet more ideas. Or maybe an actor asks you a question about a line that no one ever had before and that gives you an idea about the character who says that line. But as the playwright, even if it's the "real" production, you are entitled, as the playwright, to keep tweaking things up until, like, a week before you open; not, like, completely changing an act or anything, but cutting a few lines here, changing one or two lines there....that kind of stuff.

* Then the play goes into "previews," which are really early performances; these are full-on performances before a paid audience and everything. but the director is allowed to tweak things, and they may consult with you about one or two tiny line tweaks as well.

* Then is the official "opening night," and only then is that considered the final draft of the play.

So that's at least six totally different periods at which six totally different groups of people could be giving you feedback on your play. And that is actually not a lot; and it actually is all very helpful. And I say this not just as a literary manager, but also as someone who's written a couple plays, and someone who has worked on a lot of them. Theater is a collaborative effort, and a lot of different people are affected by what you write - not just the actors, but also the director, the lighting designer, the costume designer, the stagehands, etc. And the audience, of course.

And moving a play from "sitting down and reading it" to "bare-bones production" to "live in front of an audience for real" always adds a new dimension to whether a play "works" - there simply are different nuances that come into play at each and every one of those stages, and any one of those nuances can affect the success of a play. There was one play my company produced where I thought everything was great, but the very last line, when I read it, I didn't get. And then we did a staged reading, and I liked the rest of the play, but still didn't get the last line. And then we did the workshop and I still felt the same way about that last line. It wasn't until the official opening night that we got to the end of the play, and something about the combination of the staging, the audience mood, the actors' delivery, and everything else suddenly made me listen to that last line and suddenly think "Ohhhhhh, now I get it."

And speaking as a writer - I sat in on a bunch of rehearsals for a ten minute play I wrote in 2007, and somewhere around rehearsal number 3, after listening to the actresses say those words over and over, I realized that I could do much better - and showed up at the next rehearsal with a totally different draft, where I was all, "right - okay, cut this paragraph all together. Move the paragraph from this page to this one. change this line on page 3 to this...." and I shook the whole thing up. Maybe two pages were the same after that shakeup.

So feedback from other people, and learning how to process it, is vital to writers - and especially to playwrights, because you'll be having to get a lot of it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:46 AM on October 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

I am in a playwriting workshop right now in NYC -- I'm only a few weeks in but it has been helpful. Memail me if you want details.

Also shoutout to EmpressCallipygos for an amazing comment! The number of times I've tried explaining the developmental process to relatives and people at parties...
posted by Zephyrial at 10:37 AM on October 13, 2015

Oh, another thing to add about writing for theater:

Sometimes, you'll also be working with different theater companies altogether at each step of the process. And sometimes - if a company senses that you're resistant to their feedback - the company itself may be the ones to "break up" with your play.

Now, this doesn't mean that you should "go along to get along" if a company is giving you feedback that you know in your gut is just not going to suit your play. If you've written a witty-wordplay Alan-Sorkin type of comedy, and the director and producer are giving you feedback that would be turning it into a Three-Stooges type of broad physical farce, then that's clearly a case of a mismatch between what they want for your play and what you want for your play and it makes perfect sense for you to say "yeah...y'know, I don't think so." But if everyone's on the same page about what your play is about and what genre it is, but you're resisting feedback, the producers may not be too eager to work with you again, or to keep developing your play. An example: I once was the stage manager and dramaturg for a lovely thing about the US/China detente. it was the playwright's first-ever play; it had had one small community-theater production in Wichita, and this was his professional New York debut. And it was a lovely, lovely play.

But it had a couple of lame-ish jokes in it here and there, and we sat the playwright down and very gently suggested that he cut just a couple of 'em, maybe. And if he had, it would have definitely made the difference between it being a great play and it being a SPECTACULAR play. No one would have missed those jokes. but the playwright refused, on the grounds that "but people laughed at them when we did them before". The problem, however, wasn't that the jokes weren't funny; it was that they weren't necessary. They were funny, but they stuck out as a tiny bit out of place. But he was so stubborn about them that we just gave in, finished the workshop with him, and...then just let him go. Which was a shame, because he never changed those jokes, and the play never got good enough to be published as a result.

So going through people offering feedback is also letting you develop the very, very important skills of "learning to receive, assess, and evaluate feedback" and "learning to acknowledge when someone else's perspective may actually be right".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:14 AM on October 13, 2015