Naplwrimo 2009 Burst #4: The Ways We Stop Ourselves by Sherry Kramer

I had a student come to me with last week with something that was troubling her. She thought that her play was no good because all the characters in it were too sweet—she was following her impulse to write about the down and out, about prostitutes and disenfranchised people, she had a story she wanted to tell, but the problem was that the characters who arrived to tell it with her were all kind and generous. Did I think this was all right? 

I told her that we go to the theater for the same reason that we fall in love—to see the world through another’s eyes. That’s what you bring as a playwright—your eyes, your way of seeing the world.  If you start second guessing that, if you start distrusting your vision—then there is very little point in writing your play. This playwright may someday write a play with venomous, dishonest characters—but not this one. And if she really wanted precedent for comfort, she could take it in the fact that for every 2 black-hearted streetwalkers in our art form, there are 3 hookers with a heart of gold. Her play doesn’t have to look like an edgy HBO series to create value and meaning. One of the things that we all forget sometimes is that innocence may very well be a pre-condition for creating art—that ability to experience wonder, that refusal to be jaded and consider anything known, or “old,” or fully understood—the innocent goes out into the world, into their art, looking for understanding. The jaded goes out looking for sensation. Your audience likes both, of course, but given the choice—their hunger for insight will trump sensation every time. 

I think that, in general, self-censoring is the soul killer. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should uncouple all our filters and just free associate page after page: someone said that what is written without effort is read without pleasure. (I’m pretty sure that’s not strictly true—we’ve all had whole scenes that just arrived like manna from heaven, and it’s scary how much better they are than the things we toil and sweat over—still, in general, if you don’t care about your work, it won’t be something that other people will care about, either.) So trust your vision. Trust it all the way to the end of your first draft. I’m also a believer in not showing your play to anyone, unless you have a really reliable first reader, until you make it to the end. You’re going someplace important. Picking up hitchhikers—and they encourage a detour here or there, right?—can be dangerous, just like our mothers have always said. 

The great thing about writing a play quickly is that it doesn’t give you a lot of time for self-censoring. One of the great and terrifying things about writing a play is that it’s not like a novel or short story or poem—theatre is a time bound art. It relies on the human beings, in real time, on stage and in the audience.  It begins and ends the way a breath goes in and out, and you must pack an entire world inside that breath, that simple in and out.  It happens, on stage and inside us. And to write it you have to get all the way to the end of that breath, before it’s gone. Before you have lost it. Sometimes that takes some running. And always, it takes belief. In yourself, in your vision. 

So rush headlong into your plays and don’t look back, drive like a New York City driver, break the speed limit, pick up hitchhikers if they don’t derail you, but remember that your vision is what you bring to the table, and if you start fitting it with too many pairs of corrective lenses too soon, the audience will end up seeing something they could see anyplace else. We deserve the chance to see the things that only you can see, the way you see them. 

And when you’ve written your first draft? Remember that rewriting is a different kind of magic. In Yeats’ famous poem “Among School Children”

How can we know the dancer from the dance

Started off as:

 It seems the dancer and the dance are one. But he would never have found his way to that lovely line, if he hadn’t started with the un-poetry of the original one. You will have plenty of time to bring on your inner Inspector General later.  But not now. Trust your impulses, and your audience will too.

Sherry Kramer's work has been seen at theaters across the country and abroad, including the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, InterAct Theatre, Yale Repertory Theater, Soho Rep, Ensemble Studio Theater, New York's Second Stage, The Woolly Mammoth, The Tokyo International Arts Festival, and The Theater of the First Amendment.  She is a recipient of N E A, New York Foundation for the Arts and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Playwriting Award and a New York Drama League Award (WHAT A MAN WEIGHS), the L A Women in Theater New Play Award (THE WALL OF WATER), The Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH), and a commission from A.S.K (THE MAD MASTER). Other plays include:  WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS, THINGS THAT BREAK, ABOUT SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, NAPOLEON’S CHINA (music theatre piece with Ann Haskell and Rebecca Newton), THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (music theatre adaptation with composer Margaret Pine), THE RELEASE OF A LIVE PERFORMANCE, PARTIAL OBJECTS, THE WORLD AT ABSOLUTE ZERO, HOLD FOR THREE, BEFORE AND AFTER, NANO AND NICKI IN BOCA RATON, THE LONG ARMS OF JUPITER, THE RULING PASSION, THE END OF RADIO, THE LAW MAKES EVENING FALL, and THE BAY OF FUNDY: An Adaptation of One Line from The Mayor of Casterbridge.  She was the first national member of New Dramatists, and teaches playwriting at Bennington College, and often in the MFA programs of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.