Live Your Dream

The curtain rises. Your heart stops as the initial actions occur and words are spoken. You tense up waiting for the first punch line in the dialogue. Will the audience laugh? Following the first act, will they return for the second? What will be the response as the final curtain falls?

The playwright's dream is production: to be among the audience to watch actors bring your work to life; exalting in the audience's laughter and applause for the words you put into someone else's mouth. And when it happens, you believe you're at exactly at the right place where you should be and all gears of the universe are clicking together correctly.

But production (at least the initial production) is not the end; rather, it's the beginning of even more work on the piece. For it's in production that the playwright begins to see the life of the play, starts to realize where nuances exist, and gets the opportunity to fine-tune the work. During rehearsals, I always have pen in hand to mark my script for revision.

The number of changes that can be incorporated into a production depends on the director and on the abilities of the actors. Small word changes are usually easy to implement. And occasionally, the director may suggest a more extensive re-write at the beginning of the rehearsal stages. I once re-wrote the entire final scene because it wasn't going to work, and the director and I both knew that after the first rehearsal. But there inevitably comes the time when the script must be frozen so the actors have a baseline against which to memorize.

After that point, however, I don't stop making my own notes, which will be incorporated into the script after the production closes. I have sometimes made significant changes to published plays, which the publisher was willing to incorporate, since it gives them a better product to market.

Publishing is where my vision of the dream becomes more defined. A single production is wonderful. Multiple productions are better. But for me, it's in the publishing end that the dream becomes the reality. Numerous companies produce my plays, each with a unique approach and method. Unfortunately, this is where playwriting is somewhat like novel writing, where the author knows of a certain number of sales, but is unable to witness the reactions. But still there is the knowledge that all those groups are doing my plays, sometimes year after year. So I have satisfaction that the plays have merit enough to continue their lives in the publishers' catalogs.

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