Playwrights on Writing

May 24, 2009

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Stephen Belber: 'Is it better to write for Hollywood?'

My name is Stephen Belber and I am a playwright ... and I'm not sure why. Or let me put it this way: I make a tidy living writing studio screenplays; an indie movie just came out that I wrote and directed; and if all goes well, I'll be directing another of my scripts in the near future -- all of which has led me to seriously question the Sisyphean endeavor that is playwriting. I mean let's be serious, even Tony Kushner's writing movies now, so what kind of wall are the rest of us banging our heads against?

March 29, 2009

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Playwright Theresa Rebeck likes to tell stories

Last year I attended a cocktail party for a theater that was doing one of my plays. The artistic director was making a little presentation, introducing me to his staff and his board, and he said -- in front of everybody -- "Theresa's plays are always really well-structured, but don't hold that against her."

April 27, 2008

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

2008 Pacific Playwrights Festival

THESE days, it's getting trickier to be a playwright. Changing tastes and shrinking budgets have prompted theaters to cut back on, or at least rethink, the ways in which they cultivate new material. Writers programs have been closed, safe bets favored over creative risks, and alternatives -- both bold and bleak -- sought to replace the familiar development cycle of commission, reading, workshop and (if you're lucky) production.

April 13, 2008

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Richard Greenberg's fresh perspective

ONE year when I was feeling competitive, my agent went to a preview of what I thought would be a major rival. He called from the car.

March 9, 2008

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Comden & Green (and now add Beane)

WHEN I was a young writer and wore a pencil behind my ear without a hint of irony, I swore a great many things. One was that I would never adapt anything. My ideas would spring anew from my dramatic imagination and the world would rejoice -- though never quite as loudly as I would. I assumed that the desire to adapt came to older writers in a moment of intellectual bankruptcy. When the well runs dry, let's look at ole Aristophanes.

October 7, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Jane Anderson knows it's time to let go

AS I write this, I'm well into the third week of rehearsals for my new play at the Geffen Playhouse, "The Quality of Life." As the playwright, I would have ducked out by now to let the director and the actors work out the nuts and bolts of interpreting the play. Maybe I'd get the occasional phone call from the director wondering if they could possibly add or cut a line. But mostly I would rightfully be asked to disappear so everyone could mess around with the text in peace without having me hunched in the back of the rehearsal room wringing my hands.

September 23, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Dramatist Donald Margulies sees the stage in a fresh light

More than a quarter century ago, the critic Robert Hughes called the public's response to Modern art "the shock of the new." The role of art was to stimulate ideas, provoke thought, challenge ways of seeing. Today, we are experiencing a different, troubling phenomenon: a popular culture that embraces the comfort of the familiar.

May 13, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

True stories and other modern-day fantasies

WE live in a time when reality has evidently trumped fiction. The novel loses readers, as narrative nonfiction and memoirs gain in popularity. Reality television, once derided as a fad, is apparently here to stay. Young people abandon the so-called old media to post anecdotes from their lives and videos of their activities online. In theater, docudramas, in which quotes from real people are dramatized, have become more present on our stages. Today, truth is not only stranger than fiction, it also seems to be more popular.

May 6, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Casting for the stage should be color-blind

There's a wonderful old theater story about Laurence Olivier in the 1960s — he was playing in "Othello" and receiving generally glowing notices opposite Frank Findlay and a young actress by the name of Maggie Smith. One night, however, as he stormed through the jealous general's odyssey, Olivier seemed to be on fire (not literally, of course, because that would be painful, and, while certainly an interesting if too literal take on the Moor's passionate histrionics, pretty "out there" as an interpretation of Shakespeare, even for the '60s).

March 18, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Can't TiVo it. No iPods used.

I hear "The theater is dead" almost as often as "God is dead." I hear "People can't afford to go to the theater." "People don't wanna drive!" So why would anyone sit down to write "Act One, Scene One" -- especially in a town where you could make real money writing "Int. L.A. Starbucks -- Day"? Who in their right mind would do it?

March 18, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

The spread on `Spam'

IT'S a dark and crowded theater in New York. The curtain has only been up five minutes, and Steve Wynn, the billionaire owner of the Wynn Las Vegas hotel, leans in, grips my knee and whispers in my ear: "Eric," he says, "this will be great in Las Vegas."

January 14, 2007

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Embrace the bad to find the good

Here's a short list of things I do to avoid writing: do the dishes; do laundry; do the Internet (Playbill.com, the Drudge Report); read the paper; install shelves; help my kids with their homework; follow the Red Sox; go to the gym; listen to podcasts ("This American Life," "Meet the Press"); call my friends to talk about not writing; write lists.

October 29, 2006

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Puppeteer or poet, all paths lead to the page

I've been lucky enough at one time or another to be an actor, singer, puppeteer, magician, poet, film critic, playwright, screenwriter, theater director, movie director, opera librettist and book writer. What's the advantage of changing one's vantage point so often, besides the obvious one of keeping boredom at bay?

October 15, 2006

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Letting life fill in the blanks

My plays always begin as a mystery.

August 6, 2006

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Ah, those stinking badges

I have a responsibility to my audience. Lou Dobbs has a responsibility to his. Of course, I would like to think the comparisons stop here. But, alas, we're both in the entertainment biz, and we both veer into the political.

January 15, 2006

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Defying type

I've come to think of them as the Two Questions.

January 8, 2006

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Finding laughter in the grief

"700 Sundays" began as a sad calculation. Right before my 50th birthday, I found myself thinking about how life has been like an express train whizzing by as I stand on the platform watching the blur, the wind and noise almost knocking me over. I thought of my father and our all too short relationship. He died when I was just 15 years old. He worked at two, sometimes three jobs, and our one day together was Sunday.

November 20, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Truth, and other overrated ideas

When I was a kid, I lied a lot. Lying, for me, was easier than learning to tie my shoes. I could tell lies like my best friend, Dave, could eat French fries — by the fistful.

October 2, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Attack of the creeping misnomer

WE are told we should not judge a book by its cover. But the cover is that which we see first, and it is, in all life, difficult to discount a first impression.

September 4, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Don't shush the house

HAVING written the musical "Avenue Q" with the songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, I'm glad none of us knew what lay ahead once we were done. If we had known, we might have frozen in terror and never been able to finish.

June 12, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

The outsider within us

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf scoops the last of her strawberry yogurt from its plastic cup. With a satisfying smack, she downs the last dollop. It's Feb. 2, 1993, and tonight I've been interviewing her for more than four hours. One day, I hope to forge a play from the disparate puzzle pieces of her life.

May 29, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Stage invades history

JUST over two years ago I seemed always to be in California, taking part in the celebrations surrounding the release of the film I'd written of Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours." While the creative team was giving interviews and being mildly feted, more than half our minds were on rather more urgent matters: The impending invasion of a sovereign territory by the world's only superpower.

April 3, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Drama, served up on a plate

EVERYONE gets three great loves in their lifetime.

March 13, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Step out of the shadows and feel free to 'Doubt'

What's under a play? What holds it up? You might as well ask what's under me? On what am I built? There's something silent under every person and under every play. There is something unsaid under any given society as well.

January 9, 2005

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

A telling tradition

I come from storytellers. My grandfather, the best storyteller in the family, often taught his 22 grandchildren lessons through stories.

October 31, 2004

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Loss and joy

I had a happyish childhood. I grew up in a small Southern town, Lake Charles, La., in an old house filled with books and music, situated on a lot surrounded by semitropical forest. The woods were beautiful, mysterious and exciting. For a young boy in Lake Charles in the early 1960s, "exciting" meant encounters in the trees with possums, fireflies and redbirds, and to spice things up, huge creepy spiders, repulsive, prehistoric-sized cockroaches and poisonous snakes -- water moccasins, black with the spooky white gullet that gives them their nickname, "cottonmouth."

October 24, 2004

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

It may not make history, but that's not the point

People ask me in these crazy times if I, like so many others, am writing a play that might influence the course of American history in the coming years, a la "Uncle Tom's Cabin." I have replied that no work of art can do that nowadays. It would be nice if one could, but forget it.

October 24, 2004

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Shaped, in bits, drips and quips

I grew up with people telling me -- I think rightly -- that the greatest plays in the western world were written by Shakespeare, and, of course, by the Greeks. But when I started writing plays, people were trying to write plays like Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. And I thought: If the Greeks and Shakespeare were the greatest playwrights, why aren't we all trying to write plays the way they did?

September 12, 2004

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Into each play, some life intrudes

Writers believe they can fix the world with a sentence. But it's always the next sentence. Salvation, redemption, the perfect last kiss -- they are all but one elusive word away. So we search. We can't help it. We search. We try. We throw out. We search again. It is a noble effort if you are writing a book. On the other hand, if you are doing a play or a movie, it can make you, with all due literary respect, a hefty pain in the butt.

September 5, 2004

PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING

Brooklyn as a metaphor

Herb Gardner urged me to go back.