STAGE : A Clearing in the Jungle at the O’Neill

We talk about her new script for a few minutes. It’s the most personal thing she has ever written, her way of saying goodby to a dear friend and moving on. Then she cuts to the bottom line. “Is it a play?”

It’s the central question at the O’Neill, a worthier question than the one that necessarily concerns most American theater people during the regular season: “Is it a hit?”

Behind it stands a larger question: “What is a play?” When I discover the answer to this one, I can start going to Cape Cod for my summer vacation.

Instead, I like to help out at the O’Neill--the National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center.

For 24 years it has been held each July on an old farm a few miles from the house where O’Neill and his family spent their summers. When the foghorns on the sound start beeping, everybody remembers “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”--the mother drifting down the stairs, the son deciding that he hasn’t even got the makings of a poet.

The idea at the O’Neill is to see whether a script has the makings of a play. The O’Neill is supported by grants and the playwrights are guests of the conference and receive a stipend. From 1,200 or so submitted scripts, a dozen or so are selected. Each is rehearsed for four days and given two script-in-hand performances.

(These may be the most satisfying performances the play will ever receive, even if it goes on to the commercial theater, as dozens of O’Neill plays have. O’Neill sets are so sketchy that the audience is forced to fill in with its imagination, and O’Neill rehearsals are so brief that the actors have to go with their first hunches about the characters. With actors like Linda Hunt--she was here this summer, doing Anne Commire’s “Starting Monday”--those are apt to be on the mark.)

The morning after the last performance, everybody gathers for a “critique” of the play. These are invariably gentle: The playwright is as tense at this point as St. Stephen steeling himself for the first arrow. (One year a playwright had to be dragged out of his room to attend his critique.)

Nevertheless, things do get said at the critique. Other things get said on the porch, or under a tree. “I didn’t get your point when when the mother came in through the wall.” “I agree: that doesn’t work at all.” “Do you really need the mother as a character?” “Yeah, I think I do. In fact I may need more of her.”

Things get said earlier, too. It is true that at the O’Neill the playwright has the last word. O’Neill directors are there to show the playwright what he or she has written, not to muscle him into writing something else and not to paper over the cracks in his script with clever staging.

But the playwright doesn’t have the only word. At a conference people are supposed to confer. The director and the dramaturge are free to point out possible problem areas in the script and to raise questions, including who-what-when-where- and-why ones.

If there’s a bloody trail leading to the cabin in scene one, how come nobody notices this in scene two? Are we in a magic-realist world, or does the discrepancy need to be explained?

The most valuable questions are the ones the playwright asks himself. This starts in the spring, during an ordeal known as Pre- Conference Weekend. Each playwright is obliged to read his script out loud (every word) and to listen while everybody else reads his script out loud (every word.) Great lessons, it is said, are learned here, especially by first-time playwrights.

As the afternoon goes by, and heads begin to nod, the writer starts to appreciate the fact that a play isn’t merely the embodiment of somebody’s private world. It is also a public address: A vehicle for securing the attention of a group of strangers for a considerable number of minutes. If an audience this friendly is dozing, if he is dozing off, perhaps he had better take another look at his second act.

That doesn’t necessarily mean cutting the play. It can mean lengthening it, perhaps by developing a character whose place in the story wasn’t clear enough the first time; or by inventing a new framing device for the story. That happened this year when Keith Huff added a whitefaced stage manager to his “Birdsend” to help define the style of the piece.

But how much can one afford to add to his story? “Playwrights are always trying to figure out how much stage time to give each character,” O’Neill alumnus August Wilson was saying under the trees the other day. “My people could go on all night. But there’s only so much time to go around.”

That relates to a larger issue: “Finding the play.” The phrase used to be heard so much at the critiques that it got to be a joke. Now people talk about the discovering the “arc” of the play, or of tracking the “journey” its characters take.

But the problem is the same: To make sure that the story that’s being told here is the one that most urgently wants to be told. The O’Neill always posts a sketch of the set that the evening’s play might receive in a full production; but designer Fred Voelpel won’t draw the sketch until the playwright can tell him, in one sentence, what his play is about.

To the playwright who finds this a simplistic request, Voelpel shrugs and says: Sorry, but I can’t design a show until I know what it’s saying. In the real world, Voelpel adds, the playwright will discover that if he can’t epitomize his story, somebody else involved with the production will, and he may not like the results.

Career advice, however, is not what the O’Neill is about. Many hits have in fact originated here, from John Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves” to Wilson’s “Fences.” Many successful playwrights have received their first hearing here, David Henry Hwang, with “F.O.B.,” for instance.

And nobody would pretend that the men running the O’Neill-- George White, its founder, and Lloyd Richards, its artistic director--are strangers to the real world. Nobody works a room more charmingly than White, and nobody has better connections (on Broadway, in the resident theaters, in the university world) than Richards, whose wintertime job is running the Yale Drama School.

Strike that. White may outdo him. One night this summer I told him there was someone he ought to look up in Moscow: Grigory Nersesyan of the Soviet copyright agency, VAAP. “Grisha?” said White. “He’s here, working in the library.” I climbed up the creaky stairs, and there was Nersesyan, clicking off some complicated proposal for a U.S.-U.S.S.R. theater exchange at the computer. “I love this place,” he said.

Who doesn’t love the O’Neill? Partly it’s the climate--until the fog rolls in--and partly it’s the inner climate. Because White and Richards know that it’s a jungle out there, they’ve have managed to clear a space where, for a month, it isn’t a jungle; where theater people can put their best selves into finding out whether it’s a play, without needing to look for someone to blame in case it isn’t.

And then, it’s back to the city.

A. VINCENT SCARANO