The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  Hatcher: In the battle between those theater artists who say theater should be linear and those who say, “Well, life is nonlinear and hence why should theater be linear?”—is it fair to say that you play with some nonlinear ideas while holding onto Aristotelian structure?

  Norman: So far I do, but I may be breaking out of that. I think that our ability to perceive story is all changing rapidly with the amount of television that we watch and the effects of the computer world. Those things really do change the way people think. For a very long time people pretty much thought in the same ways. They remembered stories in the same ways and they presented them in the same way—the Charles Dickens version. This is how stories were presented more or less from the beginning of time. There's not a lot of difference between Tale of Two Cities and Sodom and Gomorrah. It's kind of the same story.

  Hatcher: Jon Jory, the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, said that one of the attributes that told him you were going to be a terrific writer was your ability to rewrite. When you go into a first draft, how conscious are you of how you're going to be progressing as each draft comes? Do you say to yourself, “Well, I know I can't do such-and-such in this draft because I'll be able to get back to this problem in about two months”?

  Norman: All that I know in terms of a first draft is that it's more important to get it down than it is to get it right, you know? You have to get the hundred pages filled up first. This is the thing that most people never do. Most plays never get finished. That does not mean you just force yourself to fill a hundred pages. My view of it is you wait until you can fill the hundred pages before you start to write. You feel this gathering force within you. When it reaches this critical point and you know that you've got enough to fill the hundred pages, then you start and you write it. You just get it down, and you don't let yourself labor over individual sentences, individual scenes. You get things good enough so that you can go forward. The trick about that first draft is to get your excitement onto the page, this sort of need, this urgency, this “Listen, I have to tell you this. You are not gonna believe this.”

  Hatcher: We're all supposed to learn from our mistakes. Were there any plays that you have written and said of later “Well, I guess that wasn't that necessary” or “Maybe I shouldn't have been writing that scene that day”?

  Norman: I feel like I've made almost all the mistakes. I haven't made the mistake of quitting entirely, and this is what saved me. I've continued to do this. I think that obviously there are plays I made mistakes with. Circus Valentine was a play about too many people. The Hold-Up was a play that had characters that didn't belong together naturally. Those are characters that I put together, and the audience somehow knew that these are not people who would naturally appear in the same scene. There have been lots of times when the content of something has been at war with the form of it. In fact, this is one of the things I believe most strongly about the theater—that you have a chance for a great piece of work when the form and the content meet and lock instantly. You can't just put content in any kind of form. If you have marbles you can't put them in a black felt bag.

  Hatcher: As an example of form meeting content, 'Night, Mother could never have been written with an intermission. You could never have written that play out of its natural sequence because you would have lost the compression of time and the compression of ideas and the urgency and ferocity of the debate.

  Norman: Right. In 'Night, Mother, I got away with writing an argument; by that I mean a philosophical argument. To live or not—to be or not to be. This is the question of 'Night, Mother. It's great that by shutting down everything else and creating the sense of urgency in the debate I allow people to listen to what's being said and follow it as though it were action. It's not physical action, but it feels like it is because there's threatened action at every moment.

  Hatcher: What's exciting about the younger writers you work with today?

  Norman: I do think that writing plays is primarily a thing for young people to do. There is a kind of inherent struggle in the form that is echoed by the struggle in the lives of young people to say, “Here's who I am, here's what I'm gonna do, and watch out. Here are the things that scare me, here are the things that seem unfair.” It's almost a kind of petulance of form. “I insist on telling you this. I'm gonna interrupt your life to tell you this.” Later on in people's lives they become less demanding or they realize, “Well, hey, you know, if you want to look at this in a couple of days, fine.” What thrills me about working with young writers is the fact that youth is exactly when those real thematic, dramatic issues of a career are being established. As for writing about old age, Shakespeare was the only guy that could actually write plays about the sunset years. Nobody since then has really been able to do that. Older playwrights try, and obviously some writers have written some nice things, but that striving of youth is very exciting, and somehow it seems to be central to our survival as a species.

  Hatcher: Imagine you're working with a young writer who seems to be a very theatrical writer yet is more attuned to computer-age, MTV kind of thinking—very fast, very nonlinear. You think the writing is really sizzling, but there's something about the plays that doesn't work. Maybe it's the structure. Maybe the drama isn't as conflict-oriented as it could be. Would you suggest to that playwright that she should try to write something in strict tried-and-true Aristotelian structure, or would you let that writer just keep going and discover the right way for herself?

  Norman: I think writing exercises are great. You need to have as much flexibility and power and skill and craft as you can gather up because you never know what's going to be needed by any one project. There are people who belong in film and TV and don't have that kind of sense of urgency and presence that you need to work in the theater. There's a great sentence that Lillian Hellman has in this introduction to Chekhov's letters, and she says playwrights all have this killer instinct. I think this is true. There is something about the end of Hamlet—everybody ends up dead. Movies aren't like this. Nor is television. But there are some times when you lose really big in life, and this is part of what the theater is willing to show. There are just some situations that end up killing everybody. I think that there's something about that kind of boldness, that sort of risk-taking that is natural to theatrical writers. The real people that belong in the theater know that, just know it. I'm sure that it's the same with great trapeze artists; there is probably some great thing that you have to know in your blood if you're gonna be a great trapeze star. Playwriting is a physical craft, and it's a thing that requires muscle, intellectual and emotional. People who are afraid of that, people who are afraid of doing damage—those are the people who'll never make it. You have to be willing to be a killer.

  José Rivera

  José Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His play The House of Ramon Iglesia, winner of the 1983 FDG/CBS New Play Contest, aired on the public television series American Playhouse. The Promise premiered at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and was recently seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, London. Each Day Dies With Sleep premiered at Circle Repertory Theatre, was seen at the national theater of Norway, and at the Orange Tree Theatre. The Los Angeles production of Each Day Dies With Sleep received six Drama-Logue Awards, including Best Play. Marisol premiered at the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. The La Jolla production of Marisol received six Drama-Logue Awards, and the Joseph Papp Public Theatre production received a 1993 Obie Award for Outstanding Play. Giants Have Us in Their Books: Six Naive Plays premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Cloud Tectonics was part of the 1995 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and is scheduled at the La Jolla Playhouse and the Goodman Theatre, Chicago. Honors include grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 1989 Rivera studied screen writing with Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute. In 1990 he was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, London, whi
le on a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Playwriting. In 1992 he received the prestigious Whiting Foundation Writing Award. Film and television credits include the critically acclaimed NBC series Eerie, Indiana (co-creator and producer), P.O.W.E.R.: The Eddie Matos Story (ACE Award nomination) for HBO, and the screenplay Lucky for Interscope Films. Rivera is married to writer Heather Dundas; they have two children, Adena Maritza and Teo Douglas.

  Jeffrey Hatcher: You're a playwright who also does a lot of work in television and film—you've written screenplays, produced a television show (Eerie, Indiana), but you keep coming back to the theater. Why?

  José Rivera: It's hard to leave a first love behind. Here is something I fell in love with early, very early in life, and even before I knew I wanted to be a writer I knew there was something about the theater that I loved. It's hard to let that go. I like the idea of dedicating my life to something like this. I think in more practical terms I find the opportunities for personal self-expression are far greater in the theater than in movies and television. I feel theater is the most personal of the media, then film, and then television. I also find that I need to tell stories in imagery. I consider myself an imagist, and I find that when I write through images, theater is the natural form for that type of expression, much more so than film.

  Hatcher: When you talk about imagery, do you mean in terms of imagery within language or stage visual imagery?

  Rivera: Somewhat visually, mostly within language, mostly in terms of how we express the inexpressible, how we can take the English language—its vernacular—and mold it in such a way that it expresses the things that we normally leave unexpressed. To me that is what the theater can do that the other art forms can't do and that I find missing in those other art forms when I do practice them. I find that certain stories need to be told in pictures, and when those stories urge themselves on me I write them as film. Certain stories are told through language, and those are the stories that I devote to the theater. In discussing Cloud Tectonics for a second, I knew that in discussing the nature of time and the definition of “relationships” and what “love” is that I needed all the verbal dexterity I could possibly muster—and I didn't think I could do that in pictures. Also, the theater allows a playwright a level of artistic control unheard of in the other two forms. A writer in television, once he's risen through the ranks and becomes a writer-producer, exercises an enormous amount of creative and financial control over the work; but that's rare. Most TV shows have a show runner and a staff, between six and fifteen writers; but only one person gets to run the show and call the shots—and of course, as we know, film is the director's art form. But in the theater the playwright still has enormous power to shape the outcome from casting to design; and I have tended to work with directors who are extremely comfortable with my power and do not feel, in terms of ego or territoriality, that I am a threat. You know, working for instance with Tina Landau, the director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville premiere of Cloud Tectonics, is that kind of experience. So those are the things that keep me coming back to the theater. What's kept the force going the other direction has never really been TV and film as a seduction. The disappointments that happen in a playwriting career are the things that actually have threatened me and have pushed me away. The times when I have thought to myself, “I am never going to do this again; this is just crazy,” it's because the theater itself has disappointed me, not because TV and film has been so attractive and seductive, as I said. The times when I have sweated blood for a production that has fallen short or has been mauled by the critics or for some reason the actors didn't connect with the material—when the theater itself has hurt me, that's when I've wanted to leave this. But those things have been rare and not enough to push me away permanently.

  Hatcher: Let me ask you specifically about Cloud Tectonics. You said the play is about time and love, and certainly in theatrical language you can focus on the imagery of time—the play is filled with time references—but the discussion of time is also in the very nature of the theatrical performance. In fact, the conventions of the theater will often admit that time is compressed or time elongates onstage. Audiences are quite used to the idea that something that should take many weeks takes two hours on stage or something that should take ten seconds has been elongated to four minutes. I think we have an inner appreciation of that even if we don't think about it while we're watching a play. Cloud Tectonics is very much about this idea. So when you have an idea for a play like this one, (a) where does it come from, and (b) how do you then develop it into a play?

  Rivera: Everything that I write comes from some kind of image, either something that I see or something I've heard or even just imagined or dreamed. Cloud Tectonics came from an airplane flight that I took. Plate tectonics is the study of the continental plates under the earth and their movements. When you study earthquakes, for instance, you study plate tectonics. So I was on a plane and I was looking out the window. I was trying to imagine if you had to define what “love” was or “sexuality”—how would you do it? I was really stuck. I couldn't figure out a good definition, and I realized that trying to do that is very similar to trying to understand the structure of clouds. As I was looking at the clouds going by, I kept trying to ask myself: How do you describe that structure, how do you describe that shape and those myriad shapes and those ever-changing shapes? And I realized you couldn't do it, but if you tried to and created a science to do that you would call it “cloud tectonics,” which is essentially a nonsense phrase because the clouds don't move like the plates. But I like the idea that even the title itself is somewhat meaningless, because grasping the idea of cloud tectonics makes as much sense as trying to grasp a definition for “love.”

  Hatcher: “Cloud” sounds amorphous and billowy and “tectonics” sounds like something scientific and mechanical.

  Rivera: It is the juxtaposition of two contradictory images which is the definition of surrealism. Like Magritte. Just about every one of my plays begins with that kind of imagery or that type of imagery tied to some deep emotional experience. The imagery of homeless people in New York, for instance, became critically personal once I found out that an uncle of mine had died homeless in San Diego. And that was enough to make a play out of. I get images from things I overhear, things my children say to me. There are many, many sources. And what I tend to do is gather these images. I collect them, even to the point of keeping them in a diary, and these things stay with me and I let them simmer, I let them stew for years at a time. Certain images in certain plays took many years to cook after the initial image came to me. And I tend not to be an impulsive writer. If I get an idea I don't go rushing off to write it. I had an image not too long ago of a dinner between two people who had multiple personalities. One character had three and the other character had thirteen, and if those two people had dinner what would happen? What personalities would come out and on what cues and what relationships would they have? That image came to me about a year and a half, two years ago; it stayed with me and I keep thinking about it constantly. I obsess about it, and it's that kind of thing that will stay in me until eventually the obsession grows to such a point that it demands to be written. It demands my time and I will then sit down and write the play. Once I've done the writing it goes quickly. It may take me three or four months to write a reasonable first draft—and then from that point on, as you know from your work, it becomes a process of refining and getting feedback, and that kind of thing. But the initial impulses are always images.

  Hatcher: In Cloud Tectonics, although the subject, the themes and ideas may be time and love, the story and the action involve a man, a baggage handler at the Los Angeles airport who picks up a pregnant woman during a torrential rainstorm, the storm of the century, and takes her home ostensibly for one evening. During the course of the play, during the course of their relationship, we realize indeed two years have passed in one evening. Your idea for a play about time and love could have gone in a thousand different directions. W
hat made you choose this particular story to discuss these images and ideas? What brings the idea and the story together?

  Rivera: That's a very good question. When I was going about my work of gathering imagery, one of the other images that stuck with me came the day I was driving through Los Angeles, and I passed a pregnant hitchhiker on the road who was soaking wet. She was there with her thumb out, and there was fast traffic. I didn't stop, I just kept on going, and I kept wondering what happened to her, what got her to that point. I kept asking myself the dramatic question, What would have happened if I had stopped? So what happens to me is that I will—just in the course of living and having experiences—gather fragments of unrelated images. And at any one time I could be thinking of a dozen, two dozen things or subliminally carrying them around or having them in my dreams or whatever—or my notebook. And they will form a pattern. Sometimes images find each other and they form a pattern. They belong together. Compatible images are like magnets, and when enough of those images come together and the pattern becomes vivid enough, then the play takes shape. Once I was able to put together the image of my uncle dying on the street, a conversation I overheard about a woman who'd seen an angel, my experiences living in the Bronx when I was attacked by a man with a golf club, the news stories about homeless people being set on fire in New York—once all these things came together, by some natural, mental, creative process found each other and agreed, then I had the play, Marisol. And there might have been fifty other images I had floating around that didn't agree, so they just disappeared. So these things created a pattern, and that pattern becomes the play. It's a very subconscious process. Later, it becomes a more conscious process, a more writerly process of putting pen to paper and crafting the imagery in such a way that it does agree on the stage, that they're compatible and they build on each other and that an image described in the first five minutes of the play pays off in the last five minutes. That process becomes more conscious and active.