Getting Bent

For the past four years, I’ve been doing most of my work as a triple-threat – writing, directing, and acting. This may require some explanation, especially since it’s something of a controversial decision these days.

For one thing, the bulk of my training is as a mime, a field in which you’re expected to create, develop, and present your own work – so when I began working on larger-scale productions, it seemed like a logical extension of that process. Most of my heroes – writers like Moliere, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen – functioned the same way, and I believe their scripts were significantly improved by their multi-layered investment.

For another thing, I think that our roles in theatre have become much too specialized. At the theatre where I received much of my training, we were all expected to write, direct, act, stage manage, run tech, and scrub the toilets after the audience had gone home – to give us an appreciation of all of the elements that make up a production. Furthermore, I view production as an organic extension of the creation of a script, not a separate process. I rewrite freely over the course of rehearsals, and don’t consider myself to have completed a rough draft until the first run closes.

The downsides are obvious. It’s an extraordinary investment of time and energy. I find myself having to resort to a number of people as both stand-ins and outside eyes. Half of the time I’m not second-guessing myself enough, the other half of the time far too much. But the biggest problem is this: I consider myself to be a decent writer, and an adequate (if limited) actor. I’m a lousy director. I don’t think visually. I get far more interested in process than in product, in the (only partially true) belief that one leads to the other.

There’s more to it than that, though. Like every playwright, I had a bad experience with a director.

The year was 2001. The director was a teacher of mine who I idolized. She promptly eliminated the opening dream sequence of the show, on the grounds that it was “surreal” (well, no shit), replacing it with a series of newspaper headlines shouted from off-stage condemning the US response to the 9-11 attacks. (Never mind that this had nothing whatsoever to do with the story.) Things kind of went downhill from there.

In one scene, a domestic argument between a wife and her drunken husband, she rewrote it (while I was too sick to come to rehearsal, no less) to say that he was not drunk, merely “tired”, thereby rendering their dialogue completely incoherent. She pulled me aside and solemnly explained to me that the world my play had created was a circus, and therefore decked out the main character as a ringmaster. (Aside from the fact that this was completely absurd, this seemed to me to ignore that my protagonists are almost uniformly the *victims* of their fantasies, not the heroes.) She also stuck him in a beard which the actor generously described as “Osama bin Laden caught in a paper shredder.” The cast asked me on a number of occasions to rescue the script from her. I didn’t.

She removed all of the jokes (“Too smart-alecky!”) and all of the fantasy sequences (“Too bizarre!”) – in short, removed every element that made the script unique or challenging. What’s more, she didn’t do it to clarify the story or explore the spirit of the script from another angle – she did it for no other purpose than to advance her own political agenda. I thought I’d put this behind me, but I guess it had soured me on the experience a lot more than I had thought. In fact, this was the beginning of my belief that maybe I actually could direct – because, if I could recognize that someone was making a decision that was so absolutely *wrong*, then surely I must have some sense of what would be *right*.

And, to a degree, I was right. I turned out to be a significantly better director than, say, her. But that doesn’t necessarily make me good.

I just had a script produced as part of Theatre Limina’s ten-minute play festival ("Bent"). It was pretty awesomely successful – wall-to-wall laughter, creepy in all the places it was supposed to be creepy. It was the hit of the evening, and the audience almost unanimously selected it for an encore performance. And it was so successful, precisely *because* I was nowhere near the direction of it.

The director took it and made it his own. I was barely consulted – he cut several jokes here and there, moved this sequence around, chose a different music cue – and nearly every decision was exactly right. And they’re decisions that I *couldn’t* have made, because I’m too close to it. I don’t object to the changes he made, because he understood the script, and ultimately that’s what matters. A director who can do that – take over a script and shut the playwright out in exactly the *right* way – is worth their weight in gold. So I’m reconsidering my position on the triple-threat thing.

But don’t take my word for it – judge for yourself. It’s getting remounted this Saturday, June 30th, 7pm at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. Be there or, y’know, don’t.