Early this evening, after finishing a construction job (see below), I went to a run-through of my new play, Dead Battery. It’s part of The Car Plays, a festival of plays staged within cars and produced by Moving Arts, appearing at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego starting this Thursday night. Here’s information on the production and how to get tickets.

I was very pleased by what I saw. One of the best directors I know, Paul Stein, is directing the piece, and my friend the extremely talented Sara Wagner is starring. The play is loosely based on some thoughts I had about my college-aged son’s car, parked in our back yard, as well as a writing prompt from Paul:  write a car play that is at least 50% silent.

This is the fifth time I’ve had a play in The Car Plays, but it’s the first time I was given a writing assignment. Paul had asked me and the other writers in one of our infrequent writers’ meetings how we felt about writing prompts;  I heard myself saying I would be thrilled to get one. I don’t think that that’s what I would have said 15 or 20 years ago, but maybe I’ve come to better grips with the fact that, one way or another, I’ve been writing to prompts most of my life. Most of the things I’ve been paid to write — ad copy, book reviews, radio commercials, videos, op-eds, speeches, web sites, and more — have been to spec, and you know what? The guidelines make it easier. If it’s got to be a certain length, and needs to contain certain things, and needs to be done in a certain way. it’s more like completing a puzzle and less like a big blank screen that you’re supposed to fill with words of some quality.

Car plays in particular are like writing haikus. Each play needs to be nine minutes. It needs to take place inside a car. Ideally, the main action also needs to take place inside that car. And each play needs what sitcom writers call a “button”; an even that buttons up the play and signals the end. In most cases, that means the cast leaving the car.

My first car play, All Undressed with Nowhere to Go, written in July 2006, was a comedy about an adulterous couple who had no place to go to have sex.  I wrote a sequel to that, All Dressed Up but Going Nowhere, which featured the same man but now with his wife, and to me it was heart-wrenching because you saw that these two people belonged together but just couldn’t connect. (My wife didn’t like it because in one of the woman’s speeches about the chore list I struck a little too close to home. A recounting of lists seems to be a recurring feature in my plays.) I also wrote a play called Chasm about a couple stuck up in the mountains during an earthquake — in a twist, it’s the young woman who is armed and ready to take charge — and I’m not sure how many more car plays that haven’t been produced, and probably won’t be. (Most notably Snake in a Car — still wish I could make that work.)

I wrote two very different drafts of the current one, the first was a comedy about a woman suffering from empty nest syndrome who keeps calling her son at college, trying to vicariously join in the fun. Then my wife happened to call while I was tinkering with it and I did two things I’d never done in all the years we’ve been together:  1) stopped writing to talk to her; and 2) told her what I was writing, and how it worked. She said, “What if the son is dead?” And I instantly knew that that was better and said, “I gotta go” and hung up. That meant a total rewrite because, well, now that it’s a high-school kid who is dead, it’s not such a comedy any more. Rewrites are like that:  One small change begets many more.

And then actors and directors change it more:  not the script, but the playing of it. Not because they’re arrogant — that’s an uninformed perspective — but because they bring their own talents to it and, especially in the case of a car play, the production must bend to accommodate the needs of the production. In this case, my script was running a full 50% over the time limit. When I wrote this draft, I wondered if it was actually short — we discovered only in the first reading that it would probably be long, and Paul and Sara didn’t learn just how long until they started rehearsing with props. I’d never before written a play that was at least half silent, and it was difficult to time in my head how long it would take to, for example, look at a CD case with judgment, scowl over an empty whiskey bottle found in the back, pull a face over a pair of discarded panties, and more. In the draft, I have Esme leaving the car to retrieve  a trash bag; that was taking too long, so Paul suggested that she use empty shopping bags and junk-food bags left behind in the car. He also found a way to jumpstart the action in Dead Battery by presetting the actor in the car. But finally, he called to ask if he and Sara could suggest line cuts and I said of course. When you’ve got really good people who have earned your trust, it’s only right that you trust them back. I saw the line cuts today in print and heard them tonight and they were minimal and well-chosen.

A couple of months ago I had lunch with another actor, someone I’ve been doing theatre with 15 years. Somehow or other I’d gotten into a joking framework with him on Facebook and then realized I’d stumbled into a concept and posted “I should write this as my next play.” He immediately IM’d me to say yes, do that, and then we met. This opportunity too has a set of specs, so once again I’ll be writing to order. I’ve got notes for that play, and I’m looking forward to writing it this week while I’m down in San Diego with my latest production.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.