Lee Wochner: Writer. Director. Writing instructor. Thinker about things.


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The community of playwriting

Sunday, April 8th, 2007

I wrote my first play almost 30 years ago when I was 14. I was attending a high school I strongly disliked that provided early lessons in how to rebel; that’s how the play came to be called “Too Long.” The “teacher” — I use the word loosely; he was assigned to in some way oversee my play production at a student event while I did my best to subvert his authority without losing the production — said that the script was “too long.” So that’s what I named it.

How did I come to write this play? I was asked by some of the other kids if I would appear in their play — a jury-trial play of some sort — and I agreed; I was thrilled to be asked. But then I noticed that most of my close friends — the odd, the inept, the ungainly and ill-kempt, the losers and stragglers, the self-conscious and left-out, in other words, people like me — weren’t invited. I kept making pitches for them to be involved in the jury-trial play, but the kids putting that on just couldn’t find any way for them to be involved, even though, unsurprisingly, there was a role for everyone on the soccer team. I understood. Kids aren’t dumb about societies of people. So I decided I’d write my own play, a comedy, with only one parameter: If you wanted to be in my play, I would write you a role. It was an equal-opportunity production. I had a lot of fun with playing off the perceived notion of my friends’ identities — I made my best friend, a seemingly weak and withdrawn boy with glasses, into a serial killer who had strangled 29 people with one hand; I turned into a femme fatale the odd girl who never turned her head lest her perfectly straight hair wrinkle; I gave great gobs of dialogue to my stammering friend with full confidence that not only could he deliver those lines, he would. And of course, in keeping with the nature of such theatrical origin stories, it all came off as a huge success. The play got big laughs and for one night everyone involved was a star. And without knowing how to do anything, with no formal training except trial and error, I became a playwright and director without realizing it.

Not much has changed. Hundreds of productions and readings and workshops later, I still have no formal training in the theatre. Instead, like an apprentice or a magpie, I’ve just adopted what works for others when I find it also works for me. Moreover, I’m still working within mini societies much like the one in school: the society of actors and directors and playwrights at my theatre company Moving Arts, the extended society of such folk locally and across the nation, the society of students and colleagues at USC. I do have some formal training in playwriting, courtesy of David Scott Milton (who shaped my career and still teaches in the MPW program at USC) and the late and much-missed Jerome Lawrence. Dave and Jerry were part of theatrical communities as well and talked about them at length and did what they could to introduce their students to those societies; that’s an inspiration and an example that I work to pass on.

On Friday night I saw the world premiere of EM Lewis’ “Infinite Black Suitcase.” (Here’s a link to the theatre company, The SpyAnts, who are producing it.) Ellen Lewis was my student at USC, then my assistant director at Moving Arts, and a member of my playwriting workshop, and now she’s out and about and inspiring other people. Ellen is both strong and compassionate, qualities that don’t always intermingle and that one doesn’t always find in writers. On Saturday morning, after her opening night and its ongoing opening-night party and toasts from many well-wishers both blood-related and not, Ellen came to workshop (of course; she’s nothing if not dedicated). In talking about the pages of her new play, “Song of Extinction,” I said that the common thread in Ellen’s plays is “being strong, and going on.” She corrected me: while they may be about being strong and going on, she felt that “going on” is possible because other people help, both in the plays and in her life. And then she turned to the workshop and generously — probably too generously — thanked all of us for what is truly her success.

Every once in a while, I’m reminded of why I’m a playwright and not a novelist. This was another instance. I never wanted to be alone in a room writing for weeks and months at a time. I wanted to be working with a group, and that was one of my earliest writing experiences. No matter how much we might complain about it at times — about the directors who misinterpret the play, the actors who bungle the lines, the producer who didn’t market the play, and on and on — every working playwright I know is here because we need these other people and secretly hope they will be as committed and as talented, as inspirational, as other committed, talented, inspirational theatre people we’ve worked for. We love the actors and the audience members and the directors and producers and everyone else, sometimes in theory, but sometimes in practice.

Almost 10 years ago now I was fortunate to be in the audience one night for one of my comedies when a woman literally fell out of her seat laughing. The moment has passed, but it’s burned into my brain and I still love her wherever she is now. I’m still writing for that woman and other people like her, and still counting on theatre people to help me do it.

Their five most important books

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

Newsweek has a great little sampler of the books some noted writers say are most important to them. Here’s Walter Mosley’s list, which seems closest to my own reading — you’ll note that in addition to Camus, Garcia Marquez, and Freud (all represented by books I read, and some of which wound up on Doug’s Reading List), it includes Fantastic Four issues 1-100 (also a prominent suggestion to Doug — and to you). Mr. Mosley is a man of taste.

I have a great deal of respect for Dana Gioia’s work at the National Endowment for the Arts in bringing art to people who’ve never gotten much of it before, and his speech at a national conference several years ago similarly impressed me. One of the things he talked about was the death of his child, and how when something like that happens to you it burns through your life like a prairie fire, bringing instant clarity. It was thereafter that he set about quitting his (very successful, very lucrative) corporate marketing executiveship and dedicated himself to being a full-time writer. Here is his list of the five most important books to him; given his personal story, I think I’ll be reading the Merton book.

Marshall Rogers, 1950-2007

Monday, March 26th, 2007

rogersbatman.jpg

Comic-book artist Marshall Rogers, best known for his definitive work in the 1970’s and 80’s restablishing the gothic nature of Batman in “Detective Comics,” died Saturday, Newsarama is reporting.

I always loved his work, and reading of his death just now reminded me that I met him once about 25 years ago at a comic-book convention. But then I seemed to recall something else, and picking through the cluttered attic of my brain finally helped me stumble across the lost memory I was seeking: I interviewed Rogers over the phone in 1985 for The Comics Journal. I pulled down the relevant issue — #100 — and there it is. And here it is transcribed online if you’d care to see it.

Rereading it just now resulted in these immediate observations:

  1. I was a really bad interviewer. At least this time, and at least at first. The beginning of the interview is, well, flat-out rude: “First off, what have you been doing for the past few years?” That’s information I should have already known — and I suspect I did — but there is a better way to get it. My followup, “So more or less, over the past few years, one strip has been your job,” has a similar attitude that I regret. In retrospect, Rogers was nicer than I would’ve been.
  2. I suspect I was also picking up Journal editor Gary Groth’s pugnacity. I recall his recurring snipes to me about Denny O’Neil (whom I also interviewed in this issue) for being a heavy drinker; later, after the interview, I made nice with O’Neil and we wound up having a very pleasant Chinese lunch in Manhattan on the Marvel expense account. I also remember that I discussed with Groth the angle he wanted for each of the five pieces I have in this issue. Why he assigned me to interview Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of both “Mad” when it was a comic book and “Little Annie Fannie” in Playboy, I’ll never know, because I was completely unqualified — something Kurtzman glommed onto instantaneously, threatening to hang up.
  3. The interview, like all things from 1985, is incredibly dated. In the wake of “Shatter,” the first comic book done on a computer, I ask him if he’s afraid computers will supplant artists. Twenty years later, all mainstream comics are done on computer. You can also see how much the field was in transition in the mid-80’s, with the shift to creator-owned vehicles and profit-sharing.
  4. Hey — I too am one of the people whose intellectual property is being stolen on the internet. I say that because I sold one-time rights to the Journal for this interview, and here it is on the web for free. I guess we’d all better get used to that, if we’re not already. Either that, or I can emulate David Thomas of Pere Ubu and countless others who spend long hours hounding people around the globe to take things down. (And I’m linking to the interview — which I hadn’t even remembered conducting — so how put out am I truly?)

Please pardon my bringing these things up in what is, to some extent, a death notice; I just feel like a part of my life from more than 20 years ago came knocking.

Rogers’ work on Batman was clean and moody at the same time (and at its best when inked by Terry Austin); his Mr. Miracle had a sharp plastic snap to it that made it ping off the page. I’m not well-versed enough in the technique behind these tricks to explain how, but Marshall Rogers’ covers always stood out on very crowded newsstands. They belonged to what was a highly plastic era, but had a rigor and a punch that a lot of comics were missing. I’m sorry I won’t be seeing any more of that work, or any more of him at conventions.

Punchdrunk and silly

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

After more than 30 hours straight of writing, punctuated only by a few hours of passing out here in my office, I think I need to walk around the block or something.

The good news is, I’ve made strong progress on my book (about playwriting).

The other good news is that I finished a new one-act play in time for submission to a festival I was contacted about.

The not-so-good news is that I just caught myself sending emails like this one, to a friend of long standing (and sometimes sitting, and other times lying down):

Appropos of nothing, I thought I’d send you my new play, “Next Time,” written in time for submission to a one-act festival this September. (No idea if I’ll get in, but it’s run by a former grad student of mine — not sure if that helps or hurts.)

One brief moment in this play may seem familiar. About 15 years ago you wrote — and I mean HANDWROTE — a brief play in which versions upon versions of people stepped away from each other to show the layers and depths of a person. I swiped that, but because I’m lazy and it’s a short play, I’m showing only one layer, and they’re playing Monopoly. And the entire play is about layers of meaning and identity and reality, it’s completely removed from your own notion, as you see, but I wanted to acknowledge even the hint of a swipe where there might be one. So thanks for that, kind of, if, sorta.

Yes, I think it’s time for a break.

The three Fs of playwriting

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

I’m not a believer in “rules” for writers. Where rules exist, good playwrights know them – and break them.

We break the rules of grammar to create dialogue that sounds like normal speech.

We break the rules of spelling to hint at character and dialect. Having a character say “tuff” instead of “tough” provides an indicator for the actor.

We break the rules of punctuation by placing commas not necessarily where they go but where we need them: to serve as brief musical rests for actors speaking our lines aloud.

And most importantly, we break the unwritten and unspoken but all too obvious rules of conformity and convention when we have our characters say, do, and be things that aren’t popular or nice. Society is that construct that ostensibly helps people get along by burying what’s uncomfortable; playwriting is a mechanism by which writers unearth the unpleasant for art and entertainment.

As opposed to rules, I believe in what I call “craft techniques” – theatrical givens passed down to us about how to help dramatic writing play better. Actors, directors, writers, all have these techniques, and they’ve kept them because they work. A few examples:

  • Put the punchline at the end of a joke because otherwise other words step on the joke and kill the laugh.
  • Don’t have an actor cross upstage on someone else’s important line because it steals focus.
  • If you have an actor play against the expressed intention of the line, you can often get a stronger reading by revealing subtext.

These aren’t “rules,” which inhibit us; these are techniques that help us succeed, and they’re generally related to the production.

When it comes to the writing, rather than keeping in mind rules, there are three notions that I hang onto, all of them starting with “F.”

istock_000002460202xsmall.jpgPlaywriting should be – needs to be – freeing. The act of writing a play frees playwrights, through their characters, to explore issues and ideas however they see fit: to see where they take us, to look at things in a new light, to find out what we think and to learn what we don’t know. This is a gift we pass on to the audience. Being free in your writing is a prerequisite to writing.

At the same it, playwriting should be frightening. If you never ever stop and wonder if you’re going too far, then you assuredly aren’t. You need to go further. If you want an audience to worry about your characters, you’d better put them in situations that make you uncomfortable while you’re writing it. This doesn’t mean putting them in oncoming traffic; it usually means they’ve said too much, too unkindly, behaved too rashly and too wrongly, been too good and are now paying for it, or are just flat-out unlucky in a truly catastrophic fashion. If everyone is safe, the play is safe – and no one wants to see a play that plays it safe. Playing within the rules of good behavior is safe.

fun.jpgAnd playwriting should be fun. This is the other reason that rules are to be understood but rejected: They usually stand in the way of the creative impulse, of the fun. If you’re having no fun writing your play, imagine how little fun actors are going to have acting in it and audiences are going to have seeing it. By “fun,” I don’t mean comic (although if you’re writing a comedy, it’s generally a good thing if at least you think it’s funny). I mean: exciting. You get up in the morning eager to work on it and go to bed feeling the same way. You think about it in odd moments. It colors your perceptions, as when you see someone in a supermarket berating a child and you realize that’s the way your protagonist would act. You feel truly alive when you’re writing the play and somewhat asleep when you aren’t. Fun is motivational. If everyone had more fun – if everyone were able to have more fun – the world would be a funner place.

Rules constrict people. In larger society, that’s often a good thing. In playwriting, not. To write plays, you don’t need rules. You need freedom, fright, and fun.

Another day of mourning for newspapers

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Yesterday, the Washington Post trained its laser vision on the zeitgeist of “dumbed-down” game shows — which had me wondering if the writer had ever seen any game shows previously. (I know that my generation took its cultural cues from “Match Game.” Oh, the good ol’ days.)

Today, I discover that the paper’s online version seems to be doing video interviews with, um, nobodies, talking about nothing in particular. Click here for a case in point. To my trained ear, Mr. New (great name) is a case study in “unreliable narration,” in which while he believes himself a knight errant, we can see what a neurotic loser he is.

If only there were some news to cover, or some interesting modern philosophers to interview, and if only we had a newspaper or a website that could disseminate this information.

Who benefits?

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

I’m always asking students about the characters they’ve created, “What’s their motivation?” Although at some point or other most of us will act irrationally at least once, most behavior is defined by our pursuit of objectives. Asking what someone was trying to do, and therefore why they acted in the way they did, usually tells the tale.

Along a similar line, Deep Throat advised Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigation,  “Follow the money.” If you follow the money, and track who benefits, you find the culprits.
Which brings us to Scooter Libby. Hard as it is for me to imagine, I find I’m spending some part of my thinking yesterday and today feeling sorry for Mr. Libby, who faces up to 30 years in prison. That’s because I can’t understand why he would have gone down the path of exposing one of our own spies, because I can’t track his motivation for having done so. That is, unless he was ordered to do so by someone higher up in the chain of command.

I’m not alone in that theory, as this news report shows. The jury that convicted him — comprised of what sound like very smart and highly trained people, including a former reporter for the Washington Post — also believe that Mr. Libby was acting under orders.

That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that our court process doesn’t appear to be headed further up the chain of command.

Another appearance of Dr. Mabuse

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Dr. Mabuse, as you may recall from this earlier post, writes a manifesto of evil that compels acolytes to bring down society through chaos and confusion. To contemporaries — including Josef Goebbels, who initially banned it — the second Mabuse film, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” presented an allegory for Hitler, who wrote “Das Kampf” and then inspired others to implement it.

In Europe, the legend of Dr. Mabuse continues to grow. And why not? They experienced his “testament” of World War II in a way we did not. Many people have taken the Mabuse mythology and twisted and interpreted it for their own reasons, and again, I say why not. If Supergirl can go through so many iterations, then Goebbels is free to shoot new framing sequences that insist that Fritz Lang’s film blames society’s ills on the Weimar Republic and that herald Hitler as the cure.

Some of this was on my mind last night in a conversation with a friend who, surprisingly to me given his proclivity for the provocative and obscure, hasn’t seen these Lang films. Today, he emailed with another coincidental and bizarre Mabuse appearance (and before I quote him I should note that during this conversation I connected Lang, and Mabuse, and World War II, with a lengthy discourse on Samuel Beckett hiding from the Nazis durings World War II):

Curiouser and curiouser. Last night after we spoke I opened a box of books I had ordered. There was a novel titled “Red” by Richard James. It involves “the curious machinations of Dr. Mabuse” and thanks Grove Press for permission to quote from Samuel Beckett’s play, “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Does any of that sound familiar??? Beyond coincidence? (Play “Twilight Zone” theme here.)
I bought it from edwardrhamilton.com. The original price was $14.95 but they have it as a remainder for $3.95. The stock number is 6050662, in case you want to check it on ERH’s search engine. It was published by gaymenspress.co.uk, if you would like to check there for more info. I imagine it will have a bunch of gay men somewhere in it.

I checked out “Red” by Richard James on Amazon.com, and yes, there seems to be a connection to my new master, who orchestrates all our doings behind the scenes. My heart goes out a bit to Richard James; not only does the novel not seem to have sold well, but it appears that he’s taken to reviewing it himself on Amazon, and under his own name, as this link reveals. If you can write a clever book involving a mastermind plotting to take down society, certainly you’re clever enough to set up a psuedonym to review your own books, no?

I suppose I should be unsurprised that someone who would want to touch on Dr. Mabuse would also gravitate toward Beckett. I think the big surprise is that Grove Press permitted the quote (perhaps these things are easier now that Beckett is in the ground). One can’t tell from either site, Amazon or Hamilton, that the book is published by “Gay Men’s Press” (Hamilton says “GMP”), but when you click the latter site for “related reading,” you get titles like “Fag Hag,” “Father’s Day,” and “The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket,” so it seems a safe bet that the book relates not only to society’s “irreversible decline,” but also to the man (and men) behind it.

Biting the hand that doesn’t feed

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

You may have noticed my advertising content listings on the right column. So far they have generated precisely zero in income, although, as they say, hope springs eternal (except when it dies a slow death). I was intrigued to find out what listings would arrive in that column, and so far am unsurprised to learn that most of them are listings for writing-related sites. (As they should be.)

One of them, blogit.com, caught my attention. “Get paid to blog.” That sounded interesting. I wondered how much it could be, figuring that it couldn’t be much. In fact, I figured that by comparison, third-world microloans would seem like jumbo loans. Bear in mind my past experience of writing for The Comics Journal for a penny a word in the 1980’s (when they even bothered to pay and honor other commitments; they stiffed me for the Jack Davis interview they finally ran 15 years ago in #153, and couldn’t be bothered to send me a copy or even a xerox, despite my polite and then not-so-polite requests until a few years ago when I finally Gave Up).

Well, I don’t know what Blogit pays but the site’s business model leaves me thinking it would pay perhaps no more than The Comics Journal at times — zero. In fact, it’s even worse than The Journal, where at least it didn’t cost me anything other than my time and my expenses to have my invoice and my requests for copies ignored. On Blogit, one gets paid to blog by posting blogs that generate enough clickthroughs from paying subscribers to generate interest, whereupon one gets a share of that paying subscriber’s subscription fee. How to become a Blogit.com writer? By subscribing. So it’s pay to play.

I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t just set up one’s own blog and set up sponsored listings.

Moreover, here’s a sample of a blog I found on Blogit. Please read this and tell me that somewhere out there someone exists who will pay for this sort of writing:

Here we go….

Here we go. I was planning to write a daily opinions page on all things creative, but I have a history of great plans laid to waste when real life gets in the way. It may be weekly, or monthly or…. well you know how it goes. Watch this space…. While you’re waiting for my creative genious to be…

Why does it trail off in the end (and just when I’m so thoroughly captivated by her quest for something to say)? Because you have to click for the rest, and to click you have to be a paying subscriber. I wasn’t quite so enrapt that I fished out my credit card. The above post has one comment, by the way, and it reads thusly: “Welcome to Blogit!”

So who, evidently, pays for the blogs on Blogit? The people who have signed up to create them with the hopes that they can generate income. And who reads them? Probably no one.

“Lost” interest

Friday, February 9th, 2007

losttvpik0207.jpgA few years ago I borrowed a video tape from good friend and actor Mark Chaet. The first thing on the tape was the premiere of “Lost,” and I wound up watching it — and these years later I’m still watching the show. The difference is that I used to enjoy it.

Where the show used to be about event — a plane has crashed, and how will we survive, especially when there’s an invisible monster in the woods? — it’s now about effect: “Here’s how we’ll double back in the writing again, here’s how we’ll string the audience along, here’s the shocking surprise” and so forth. Of course the show always had these effects, but they weren’t the point of the endeavor before.

I’m still watching the show because it’s become a ritual for my eight-year-old daughter and me to watch it together and I can’t bring myself to tell her that much as I like her, I don’t like the show any more. (As with Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest, I too am trapped on “Lost” island.) This week’s episode — the return from a three-month hiatus — clarified my disenchantment. We get a lot of back story on Jack’s blonde captor, Juliet, which is absolutely uninteresting because I don’t care about Juliet. Indeed, the show has trained me not to care about recently introduced characters. Just as soon as Michelle Rodriguez’s character of Ana Lucia, a gun-toting, smart-mouthed, emotionally battered former member of the LAPD, had breathed gasoline into the show’s carburetor, she was shot to death. Another character torn between the good and bad, Mr. Eko, was similarly dispatched. At one time, the love story of Rose and Bernard was seemingly so important that an entire episode had to be devoted to it, but I haven’t seen or heard from them in months and months. So why care about Elizabeth? Because the unshocking revelation is that she too is a prisoner on this island and has been for three and a half years? You could say the same thing about driving to Burbank from Santa Monica. No, the most interesting aspects of Juliet’s flashbacks was seeing “Deadwood” actress Robin Weigert sans her Calamity Jane accent.

Just as I no longer care about the back stories of the show’s new characters, I find that its metafictional tricks have grown dull. It was fun at one point to see Walt reading a comic book featuring a giant polar bear and then to see just such a bear menace the islanders. It was also amusing to have the leader of the Others named, at least temporarily, after the fictional Henry Gale, whose niece was blown by a tornado into a mythic otherworld named Oz. But now the references seem more copied than creative. Sawyer and Kate break into one of the hatches to rescue Alex’s boyfriend from Room 23, number 23 being both one of Hurley’s numbers and also the title and subject of a forthcoming Jim Carrey movie in which everything apocalyptic is associated with the number 23. Those two references seem in keeping with the show’s history of reference and self-reference. But what is inside Room 23? A scene we’ve already seen — an iconic scene — depicted no fewer than 35 years ago in the film of “A Clockwork Orange.” In “Lost” it seems less an homage than a swipe.

A prime metafictional misfire would be the demise of Juliet’s husband. Surely no one was surprised when Juliet said she could join up with what turns out to be Dr. Moreau’s island only if her ex-husband is hit by a bus — and then it happens. Was the effect comic? No. Because it was foreshadowed so strongly that only the blind deaf and dumb could have not foreseen it, it missed being comic, or even jokey, and instead seemed a pathetic gasp from an etherized patient who was not going to make it.

When did the show slip? At the time, it felt like the end came with the valentine to Rose and Bernard. But in a larger context, I think provisioning the castaways was a mistake. Shadowy commercial enterprises, such as the one evidently behind the Others’ research, are worrisome in a general aspect (witness Halliburton) or, sometimes, in a practical aspect (as when they show up with guns and animal cages on “Lost.”). But in the day-to-day, nothing is more fearsome than hunger and privation. Once food and supplies began materializing, either in underground vacation villas like the Hatch, or in drop-shipments around the island, the exigencies of day-to-day survival took a back seat to philosophy, much to the show’s loss.