Play Time : ONE PLAYWRIGHT, ONE DIRECTOR AND SIX ACTORS IN SEARCH OF A PLAY : THEATER-BY-COMMITTEE: EVERYONE’S AN AUTHOR

THE STORY

For five weeks this summer, playwright Clifton Campbell left his wife and job in Chicago, packed up his new play and headed West.

Campbell’s play, “Emerald Tree Boa,” was one of three selected from nearly 200 submitted to the first UCLA/Mark Taper Forum new-play workshop. Mark Medoff, a Tony-award winning New Mexico-based playwright, directed the workshop generally and Campbell’s play specifically.

Through July and into August, Campbell endured a kind of theater-by-committee. Day after day, he listened as everyone from actors to audiences got to play critic. Night after night, he went back to his typewriter, trudged through his notes and rewrote.

By the time Campbell headed home, “Emerald Tree Boa” was a very different play.

THE SETTING

A restaurant, a printing shop and a luxury apartment house, each represented by a table and a couple of chairs in a large classroom-cum-performance space at UCLA.

THE TIME

The present.

THE DIARY: JUNE 30

First day of workshop. Student actors fill a theater at UCLA’s Macgowan Hall, then scatter to audition. So do recent graduates and others recruited to play some of the more mature parts. Nearly all of the “Emerald Tree Boa” actors selected by nightfall have some professional acting experience. The only paid actor, guest artist Susie Duff, 32 and pregnant, remarks to Campbell that if the lead character she’s playing is supposed to be 23, “you’ll have to blind the audience.”

JULY 1

First reading. Prepare to be violated, director Medoff warns author Campbell. Medoff says whenever he as playwright first comes together with a group of actors, he feels violated. But he feels only two of his 12 plays have been ruined by overwriting and overlistening, he adds.

Medoff’s warning to actors: “We’re here to serve the writer, not to make you stars. If you’re wonderful, we’re not going to forget you.”

Medoff’s warning to the writer: “A play is like a great big tapestry. If you pull a thread, you have to reweave the whole sucker.”

Seated in a circle on the floor, the six actors read Campbell’s play aloud. A year in the writing, the play explores what happens when a successful restaurateur and a printer both become dangerously infatuated with the same young, upper-middle-class woman.

Reading completed, and everyone throws out an opinion. Unanimous complaint about the woman, Tommie. Several people say that not enough happens during the play.

Campbell goes off to take Bayer Extra-Strength Aspirin. The process has begun.

JULY 2

Leading lady Duff has car trouble and is stuck on the freeway. Agreeing to read Duff’s lines, reporter takes to the stage for the first time since playing Queen Esther in a Sunday-school play.

Duff finally arrives and reporter goes back to reporting. Actors are already questioning Campbell’s lines and improvising their own. Scenes are moved around, lines cut and motivations challenged. Campbell alternates pacing and taking notes. “Boa” has 26 scenes, but will have 40 by the time it is performed in August.

JULY 4

Time to build up team spirit. The cast forms a line and faces Medoff. Dressed in running clothes, Medoff throws a volleyball, then a tennis ball, to each actor. After a few rounds, everyone rotates and the next person is the prime tosser. Some throw fast and hard; others barely keep the ball in play. The playwright walks in with the day’s new pages, says: “Excuse me, I must be in the wrong room,” then takes his turn.

Later the three actresses playing waitresses are talking tips. They improvise a few minutes, then get stuck because they aren’t sure how much money waitresses make during lunch. As the three women huddle over computations, Campbell turns to the reporter: “They’re doing all the stuff out loud that I do in my head.”

More readings, more improvs, more volleyball. Group breaks at 6 p.m. and goes off in search of fireworks.

JULY 5

Playwrighting by committee has begun to affect Campbell. He’s making jokes about how there’s never a hand grenade around when you need one. He’s talking about life back home in Chicago.

Here’s Campbell’s life back home: He works all day as art director at an ad agency. He takes the train, alone, (“It’s the Chicago version of the mantra”) to his house where he rapidly consumes the dinner his wife Claire left for him before she went to work. Then he goes into his home office and writes. His wife goes straight from work to aerobics class because she got tired of “my not eating with her because if I ate with her, she’d want me to talk to her.”

(All true, Claire says later. A marketing specialist at Inland Steel Co., she says: “It’s so frustrating to eat dinner with him because he won’t talk. He’s already writing in his head. So I just gave up.”)

Back to Campbell: “Writing has always been real private with me. I have to be in a shell to do it. Believe me, I appreciate what’s happening here (at UCLA) . . . I’m just having a little trouble.”

JULY 6

Medoff swears by the workshop process, saying he always does at least two and sometimes as many as eight productions of his plays before he lets them go. (One result is that he “bagged” two of them.) Nearly all of the nation’s regional theaters develop new plays, and Medoff says that an increasing number go through workshops like this one (although with fully professional casts). Why? “Because the extraordinary nature of the theater demands that plays get on their feet and get walked around and pushed around a room.”

Few people could push a play around a room the way actress Susie Duff pushes. (Duff performed key roles in two John Guare plays at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre in 1984 and has played off-Broadway.) Medoff and Campbell both wanted her there to question her lines, flesh out her part, challenge the material. She delivers all that and more, with incredible candor.

Take sex, for instance. Duff wants more of it in the play. “The scales have got to fall from your eyes,” she tells Campbell with absolute certainty. “Maybe I’m being too aggressive as an actor, but sex sells.”

JULY 11

Everybody’s off for a week while Campbell rewrites Act I, and Calendar visits the playwright on campus.

Does he miss Medoff and the actors? “A week away from these people is too much,” he confides. “I started loving and hating them. . . . I had seven days and I was so glad to get away from them. For three days. And then it was like they had abandoned me.”

Abandoned? “Yeah. You want, or you feel you want, these people to come back and screw you up again.

“I go through the entire gamut of emotions. Because I do feel like people go too far sometimes.”

How does he manage to be so, well, polite? “Does the cut in my lip tell you anything? I have Band-Aids inside my mouth. I’ve gone through three tongues. . . . But if I didn’t trust the people I was working with, I would say more. I mean, these are all adults, and they can do anything they want to between the hours of 2 and 6, but what they’ve chosen to do is help me with my play.”

Give him time.

JULY 14

Campbell walks in with new first act. The title page says “Emerald Tree Boa: A Play by Eight People.”

Today’s dilemma: Tommie (Duff) and printer Harmon (Bower) wind up at his place late one night. She’s on the couch. She’s sleepy. What happens?

The actors split by gender. The women say he is interested in her as a potential employee. The men say he is interested in her as a potential sex partner. Medoff tells the women they don’t know men. Campbell isn’t so sure. The scene ends--at least for now--with Harmon asking Tommie to head back to her own apartment. (So much for sex.)

JULY 15

A quick round of volleyball, done in character. Do it as Ed, Medoff tells Ringer, who is playing restaurateur Ed. Ringer calls out the day’s specials, laughs his Ed laugh. The playwright takes notes as they improvise.

Campbell, who rewrites several scenes each evening after rehearsal, hands out that day’s new pages. He apologizes that the o key on his typewriter gave out, and he’s replaced all the o ‘s with c ‘s. Like this last line on Page 32a: “and when ycu gc in tc dc it . . . just be hcnest.”

JULY 16

Medoff improvises a phone conversation with Duff, playing Tommie’s father. The call provides illumination of Tommie’s motivations (and, as later written into the play, is split in half to both open and close the entire play).

It is clearly a turning point in the rehearsal, and several other scenes now work better. Medoff says later that while he knew Duff was really too old for the starring role of the ingenue, he wanted her there because of all she could contribute to the workshop process.

Duff calls the workshop “an actor’s dream. I know this sounds corny, but every actor I talked to wishes he could do this. . . . It’s like a 1980s version of Mickey and Judy and ‘Let’s put on a show.’ ”

Forget that she makes less in a week doing this than she makes in a day doing TV. “In the prime-time world, your motivation as an actor is you say the line this way because it’s costing $60,000 a minute to put it on. You make it work. You’re paid very well so you shut up about any questions you may have. Unless you’ve got a lot of clout, you don’t go back to the writers and say, ‘Are you kidding? I can’t say this line.’ There are 10,000 unemployed actors who will say the line.

“Here it’s thrilling to be able to duke it out with the writer.”

JULY 17

Playwright and director comfort one another, particularly on tough days like today. Alternately torturer and tortured, Medoff has spent much of his time in Los Angeles reworking his “Hands of Its Enemy.” It is about the first production of a play which turns on the relationship of a playwright to a director, and Medoff feels his relationship with Campbell in many ways parallels his relationship with “Enemy” director Gordon Davidson, the Taper’s artistic director. And what Campbell found, says Medoff, is that the “vacillation between love and hate and between gratitude and resentment were just as sweeping as I suggested they would be.

“And I try to make sure he knows I feel those same furies every time out also, so that he sees me not just as the person who’s directing this play and totally dominating his life right now, but that in slightly different circumstances, I’m him.”

JULY 18

Now fighting off a cold and down to four hours sleep a night, Campbell admits he’s panicking. Not enough time left. He wants another week but says if he had another week, he’d still want another week. “You want to know how bad it is?” he asks nobody in particular. “I have a pencil sharpener in my pocket, and I don’t know why.”

Maybe he’s remembering his last go-round with the play. There was a reading of it last fall at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre and in February at the Pennsylvania Stage Co. in Allentown, Pa. Allentown audience members were handed a questionnaire after the reading. Question 2 was, “Would you pay to see this play?” More people said no than yes.

JULY 19

It is the last day of rehearsals before everyone takes another week off, and Campbell looks very discouraged. His wife Claire is in town for the weekend and quietly massages Campbell’s back and shoulders.

Improvisations explore restaurateur Ed’s troubles launching his dream restaurant, the Emerald Tree Boa.

Medoff looks over at Campbell: “Ed is on the edge like you. He’s got everyone coming at him.”

Campbell picks up his felt pen and writes: “Ed is on the edge emotionally.”

Campbell is suffering. He walked in three weeks ago with a play about two men in love with the same woman. Each day the play is more about the woman, and Campbell moans about how he doesn’t want to do a play about someone trying to find herself.

Medoff pushes: “Until you come to grips with her and become her, there’s not gonna be a play. You can write these guys forever. You can keep tap dancing around these guys and making them more and more human, and more and more interesting. You can write in their voices, with the greatest of ease. And it’s still not going to be a play. Until you get in and write her voice.”

Campbell caves: “Everything just went in the toilet. I’ve got to see to a level (that) when I start working again, I can push through to the end. And I’m confused. I’m terribly confused . . . in my head, I am nowhere.”

Medoff turns to Claire: “What do you think about all this? Has this been time well invested?”

Claire smiles: “I think I should have married a pediatrician.”

JULY 25

Cold reading of Campbell’s new second act, delivered on pages still warm from the copying machine.

It’s slow going. Medoff asks an actor to repeat a line. Campbell groans: “Don’t prolong this.”

Time to experiment. Medoff has the three women, Suzanne Kato, Janet Wallis and Duff, read the three men’s roles, played by Bower, Ringer and Steve Decker. Then he asks 21-year-old stage manager Sharon Muncie to assume Duff’s role of the 23-year-old ingenue Tommie. Medoff and Muncie improvise the phone call home to father. When Taper executive Corey Beth Madden walks in during the improv and tries to get Muncie’s attention, Medoff holds up his hand. Muncie, he says, is not the stage manager right now.

JULY 26

It is increasingly more difficult to tell where characters end and real people begin. Duff and her character Tommie have the same aggressiveness, the same self-assuredness.

Ringer laughs like his character Ed laughs, whether he’s on stage or off. “You tend to make it closer to yourself in the beginning because you don’t know the characters well,” Ringer says, “and all the improvising just encourages you. If someone else were playing Ed, the script would be different.”

Campbell would certainly agree. Like many playwrights watching their plays come to life, Campbell is now writing lines for the actors playing his characters. He also must write lines for 23-year-old Tommie that sound believable when said by 32-year-old Duff.

Nobody wants to play a loser either. Tommie’s growing domination of the play clearly reflects Duff’s domination of rehearsals, and Medoff says at one point that “it may be the nature of this collaborative process that we made more of these characters than you want. . . . With ‘The Hands of Its Enemy,’ (we) came up with an actors’ version where everybody had a starring role in a play about nobody.”

Some of “Boa’s” actors also can’t stop improvising. “Actors have been adding lines since the beginning of time, and you have to be careful,” Ringer admits later. “One reason you do it is because you instinctively try to relate your character to yourself and have moments of arrogance when you think you can phrase it better than the playwright and 99% of the time you’re wrong.”

JULY 27

Decker, who had auditioned that morning for a movie-of-the-week, expresses some mixed feelings about the workshop experience. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What’s hard is Cliff puts so much into his writing and we come in here, take one glance at it and we trash it.

“I think that the actor should exhaust every possibility before approaching the playwright with ‘it isn’t working.’ Occasionally Cliff’s work has met with criticism for things that were acting problems rather than problems with the script. I caught myself once or twice suggesting changes before I had found a way to make the scene work.”

JULY 31 Dress rehearsal. The tennis pro, Bower, is in his first pair of long pants and wearing a tie. Plastic bags full of trail mix and carrots have been upstaged by designer breads and cheeses from the Taper. Observes Wallis: “Everyone’s getting serious.”

After the play, the handful of invited guests get their say. Taper executive Madden says she’s fascinated with the play. The men are like Hieronymus Bosch characters. But the woman doesn’t fit: “Can someone this civilized be in a play like this?”

When a UCLA faculty member asks maybe an hour later, “has anyone addressed the question of what that woman is doing in this play?” Campbell simply rolls his eyes heavenward and mumbles, low and weary: “There are only two languages in which that question has not yet been raised.”

“I’m not a writer,” Ringer later says to the reporter, “but what has happened is we are neutralizing her sexuality. We are projecting all the sexuality coming from the men and that makes us look more and more grotesque.”

AUG. 1

“Boa” cast goes as a group to performance of “Iowa Boys,” a provocative new play by New York writer Shem Bitterman, directed by Taper resident director Robert Egan. The play, which dramatizes wife abuse, has also been produced in the new-play workshop. But instead of actors reading from scripts among minimal props, as “Boa’s” players will the following day, “Iowa Boys” actors perform without scripts in a production so polished it could almost be moved onto the Taper stage. Everyone from “Boa” seems discouraged.

Discussion follows the production. Duff calls “Iowa Boys” characters “sniveling little nerds.”

Bitterman: “I’m sorry you don’t like my characters. What can I tell you?”

Duff does a monologue about herself, people she knows, what she missed in the play: “That’s what I’d like to see.”

Bitterman: “Then you write the play.”

Duff continues.

Bitterman throws up his hands: “Never mind. I don’t feel like arguing.” Quite a contrast to Campbell, who is continually rewriting to accommodate criticism. Campbell’s newest ending has everyone in Tommie’s apartment tying up dangling plots, and even Medoff concedes it is forced. In fact, when actors David Andrews and Radha Delamarter drop in later that evening for another “Boa” run-through and criticize the new ending, Medoff quickly explains that “we foisted that on him. It came out of the improv.”

AUG. 2

Afternoon of first staged reading. First chance for major feedback.

Campbell is off writing another ending. Medoff welcomes invited audience members. An electronic sign flashes “Quiet, Please, Performance in Progress.”

At 1:55 p.m., five minutes before curtain, Campbell’s face appears in an office window overlooking the theater entrance. He leans out the window and yells, “How do you spell continent ?” Medoff turns, spells it, resumes the conversation he’s having.

Showtime. Maybe 50 of the theater’s 90 seats are full. Medoff stands center stage and explains the process. Some of the play has been rehearsed, he says, some not. They’re still waiting for the last scene, but not to worry. The cast will rehearse during intermission. Audience members laugh, assuming he’s joking. The play begins.

Intermission at 3:05 p.m. Cast members get the new scene, sit around a table backstage reading it. Campbell stands in a doorway eating an orange and looking frazzled. (Campbell later says he thought the last-minute scene switch “was a little ridiculous . . . I knew all I was doing was putting a tourniquet on a bleeding arm and hoping the arm didn’t fall off.”)

Play resumes, but Campbell’s gone. Embarrassed by the first half “because I knew I could write better than that,” he fled altogether during the second act. “I was doing aerobics in my seat, I was squirming so much. I left at intermission because I didn’t want people to see how uncomfortable I was.”

Time for audience comment. College girls in the audience say they identify with the young woman. Middle-aged man in the audience asks if the young woman is a lesbian, perhaps a bisexual?

AUG. 3

Cast evaluates “Boa” for the reporter:

Ringer found original script “more intriguing in many ways. . . . She was a mythic female before. Now we’ve ‘demythologized’ her and made her into a nice girl. . . . The things that make it very good now are the vestiges of what it was before. It’s safer now.”

Wallis disagrees. The play is “hundreds of times better now. It’s dense and it’s complex and has several themes.” What about? “About the growth of a young woman and the dangers of her innocent charm. It’s about male fantasies of women. About choices women have to make in a man’s world. “

And Campbell? “Ask me later.” (We do.)

Meanwhile, the cast is outside, under the trees, rehearsing yet another ending. Duff says it’s too long. Wallis, raised in England, asks what a Wesson Oil party is.

Rehearsal breaks at 2 p.m. for everyone to attend performance of the third play in the workshop, “Damaged Goods,” an ambitious drama by Ted Heller and Ken Lipman set in New York’s garment district. The play is very long, and the “Boa” cast leaves at intermission to continue rehearsals.

Cast, playwright and director go back and forth. How should Campbell better express Tommie’s sexuality? Should she get involved with the third man in the play? Campbell tosses in a bar scene where Tommie and waitress friend Adrian talk about picking up guys and even a one-line scene where Adrian crosses the stage to see if Tommie wants a blind date that evening.

They break for dinner, are back at 7:30 p.m. for the 8 o’clock curtain. A farewell football huddle just before show time. Medoff says there won’t be a discussion after tonight’s performance. “Great,” responds Campbell. “I couldn’t stand to hear one more person’s opinion. . . . I hate this play so much I don’t want to think about it again.” Medoff tells him he only has to think about it a few more hours.

Medoff introduces the play to its second and final invited audience. Tells them the play has gone through enormous change and growth. Says he thinks most of the change has been growth. Acknowledges that they changed the end each of the last three days and put Band-Aids on places that may later require surgery. The show goes on, punctuated by the loud cries of a baby in the front row. Medoff and Campbell sit outside on a fire escape through the entire performance; Campbell says later: “ I didn’t want to watch it.”

There is a Champagne reception after the performance, and a reporter asks Campbell’s agent Eileen Orr if she thinks the play improved in the workshop. She punts: “I think the original captured the rage, competition, struggle and jealousy between (two) men, and this version is about a woman. It has become a woman’s piece and how she navigates her way through a man’s world. I think there’s now a real plum role in there for a woman.”

AUG. 4

At a post-mortem, the Taper’s Davidson asks Campbell what he got out of the program.

Campbell: “This was for me to learn how to write a play with 90 people talking to me at the same time. . . . Certainly the experience was invaluable. But at the moment, it doesn’t seem so. At the moment, it just smarts.”

AUG. 6

Campbell is a different person after a few nights’ sleep.

So what if some scenes were just thrown in to get from Point A to Point B or to simply say something that needed to be said. So what that “we were structuring so fast that we did scenes about scenes.” And never mind that he “cringed” during the staged readings.

What was lost in the process? “Gordon Davidson said he felt that my voice wasn’t there now. The unique voice was gone.”

But isn’t that what attracted Medoff and others to the play in the first place? “Yes, but that’s the easiest thing to put back in when I repossess the play. I needed everyone’s help to move the story through. It’s a blueprint. Now I can put the paneling on. . . . The next draft will be something between these two.”

Five weeks on the Coast didn’t hurt either. Never mind if all he got was a $910 stipend, a room at Sproul Hall dorm (with a bathroom down the hall) and all the American cheese on white bread he could eat. He was in Hollywood!

Campbell had a TV script (“Miami Vice,” done on speculation) circulating while he was here and even took a few industry meetings before heading home.

AUG. 13

Campbell is back in Chicago. An executive at “Crime Story,” the new Chicago-based TV series from “Miami Vice” producer Michael Mann, has read Campbell’s “Miami Vice” script and contacts his agent. Campbell gets an assignment to write one episode. He sings all the way home.

His agent tries to call Campbell at his ad-agency job a few hours later, but she was too late. Flush with euphoria, Campbell had quit his job.

Says Campbell: “I went back to my office and cleared out my desk. I was given the opportunity to make a living as a writer. Every day is Saturday now.”

AUG. 21 Still in Chicago. Workshop of Campbell’s new play, “The Figure,” finished while Campbell was in Los Angeles, opens at American Blues Theatre. Campbell misses both performances to be at story conference for “Crime Story.” (Wife Claire went to the reading and took notes.)

Campbell did attend five days of workshop and development on “The Figure,” however. And how did it feel? “Everybody was going at it so timidly that I couldn’t sit still. They were just sort of reading it and spitting back at me what I put on the page. They weren’t challenging it like we did at the Taper workshop.”

SEPT. 2 Campbell will now rewrite the play (in his own voice) and send his new draft back to the Taper. There are still a few weeks left on the Taper’s 90-day option for “Boa” and Medoff has also agreed to help Campbell get later drafts of the play to other possible producers. Campbell meanwhile has spoken with Chicago’s Stormfield Theatre about an open spot in January for a new play.

But what’s happening with “Boa” now?

“Nothing,” he replies. “I’ll probably pick it up again later this month.”