Everything You've Got: A Different Approach To Production

My newest play, Everything You've Got, is (like most of my plays) a look at a family that may appear dysfunctional, but like all families they really only appear that way because they have yet to find a bond with one another. Just another character play, right? Well, I like to think it's a little more than that. After writing two or three "duds," plays that will never live outside of my MS Word diskette, I wrote this one with the intention of creating a ten-minute play for Actors' Theatre of Louisville. But then something happened. I called in some actor friends to read it, and it leaped off the page at me! The characters were so compelling, I wanted to know more. Where did they come from? Where are they going? Is this scene something inside of a larger conflict? Writing a larger chunk of play - merely as an exercise - I realized that, indeed, it was. And a full-length play was born.

The development of Everything You've Got is a wonderful way to approach the development of a script, and so I thought I'd share it. Copy the formula if you have the ways and means, or at least read it and realize that these sorts of things can be done. After the completion of the rough draft, I went immediately to work fixing obvious problems. And then, after writing draft two, I went to my actor friends (the best friends a playwright can have!) and read through it some more. Problems became obvious in the reading, and the play evolved further. Three or four drafts later, I felt pretty pleased.

The next thing I did was to go to another actor. One who hadn't been involved with the play since the beginning; one who had no prejudices towards it. Chessie, this actress, read it and wrote me back with her take on it. It contained one of the best compliments I've ever received as a playwright: "I suppose I shouldn't be, but I'm always pleasantly surprised when I read a play by a man who understands females so well." That brings up an important part of reading a play. Jeffrey Sweet, in "The Dramatists' Toolkit" (a must have for every playwright,) tells us that since we write what we know, we need to avoid having a character too similar to the playwright, since that character will have a tendency to be very passive: commenting and observing rather than acting. Therefore, to change the character representing myself and the character representing (somewhat) my brother in the play, I made them females. And the difference was amazing. Chessie's comment made me realize that women and men, essentially, are the same inside. We are all, after all, human beings. Don't treat your opposite-gender characters too roughly or too glibly.

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