Arthur Miller Revivals

In addition to the much lauded local production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, recently produced by Ferndale Rep and Arcata Playhouse, directed by Jane Hill, there is currently a Broadway revival of Miller's play The Price.  President Obama attended a performance with his daughter Malia.  The last time The Price was in New York was in 1992, when the playwright was alive.  It was the occasion for this interview with Charlie Rose.  Much of what he says about American theatre still pertains (though perhaps the quality of older actors in regional theatre is better), and what he says about playwriting and the role of theatre in society is perennially relevant.

It seems also that Miller's stature as an American playwright continues to grow. Both The Crucible and Death of a Salesman are produced frequently around the world by professional theatres as well as others.  In an American Theatre interview, contemporary playwright Theresa Rebeck said, "I have a theory that anyone who ends up with a career in the theatre was in either Our Town or The Crucible in high school or college."

Now other of his better known plays like The Price, All My Sons and A View From the Bridge are being done more often as well.  But Miller wrote other fine plays, including some shorter works with small casts late in his career.  These are at least as stageworthy as many such contemporary plays, and deserve to be seen.

From There to Here

A few items from elsewhere that have some relevance to North Coast theatre...

In the December American Theatre magazine, there's an article on how race and racial issues are reflected on Broadway, in a number of current or recent plays that reflect racial realities or comment on the subject. A number of plays are discussed, though not including the one seen here recently on PBS, as filmed by Spike Lee: Passing Strange. This was the best new musical, and among the best new plays of any kind, that I've seen in years.

North Coast theatre is notoriously white, as are its audiences, in an overwhelmingly white area. I've seen some of this change but not consistently. Last year's HSU production of Jagun Fly, a play about African Americans by John ADEkoje, a young up and coming black playwright who began writing at HSU, suggested that there are enough black actors around to stage such a play. The audiences were more racially mixed than usual. But all of this didn't seem to cause much excitement locally.

As these things are measured, the North Coast was unusual for its largest "minority" being Native American. The Native relationship to theatre is complicated, but we've had some successes--especially Salmon Is Everything at HSU a few years ago, which had more local tribal members on stage than anything I've seen here, in a work they (and non-Native cast members, etc.) created together. The largest minority today is probably Latino, and very little theatre here has reflected those cultures or that experience.

Also in December's American Theatre was a play by a young Korean American playwright, Lloyd Suh, called American Hwangap. Maybe a little limited in its ambitions, this was a fun play to read, and probably better than a lot of contemporary plays we do see here. But we're unlikely to see this one hereabouts. We probably don't have the actors, for one thing.

Voices from groups previously unheard infuse a lot of the energy in new plays these days. But according to a recent study by the Play Development Fund, new playwrights of any description are having a tough time getting produced, even in non-profit theatres. "Many of the playwrights see the nation’s major nonprofit theater companies as impediments to their work, favoring plays that have few characters to save money on actors’ salaries, for instance, or that have themes appealing to large audiences," according to a New York Times article on the study. “We heard from artistic directors who admitted that they’re all going after the same 10 playwrights to produce their work, which is largely about getting prestige in their field,” said Todd London, the chief author of the study..." The story quotes a few others talking about the "cynicism and mistrust" between playwrights and theatres.

This is not real new news, reflected in discontent over "development hell" and the shrinking and distorting of the O'Neill's new plays program, for example. But it does suggest that the kind of considerations that governed Broadway, and led to Off, and then Off-Off, as well as regional theatres, has spread throughout the theatre world.

Here on the North Coast, there is little or no support for new plays. What little there was a decade ago is mostly gone, except for work by students and folks who have their own theatres. The new model seems to be collaborative development by small theatres in different locations, such as the new musical coming to the Arcata Playhouse in a few weeks. Some new work is going to find a way to be born. Still, I'm sure we're missing voices it might be entertaining and enlightening to hear.

She Ruhls

set for 1994 OSF production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth

The theme of the Sep/Oct issue of The Dramatist (publication of the Dramatist Guild) is a back-to-school gimmick: so a number of playwrights (as well as a musical "book" author and a lyricist) gave their versions of a Master Class. All are pretty interesting and several are especially entertaining, like David Henry Hwang's-- a little play in which he pontificates but is set straight by the ghost of his agent.

But the one I keep thinking about is by Sarah Ruhl, a smart enough playwright to have copped a MacArthur grant. Her contribution is actually 10 provocative paragraphs on different subjects. I'll mention only two, that I had reason to think about in particular.

One is "On the loss of the curtain," bemoaning all the time spent dealing with the technical aspects of marking scene changes, now that the convention of simply dropping and raising the curtain has disappeared. She suggests it be brought back, or at least a single new convention replace it ("Why not lights and no sound? Or sound and no lights? Or a monkey on a pole flipping a flip book with the titles of each scene?") so the rehearsal time lost to tech can be cut, and plays themselves will be better rehearsed.

To which I say, amen. I often wonder if so much time was devoted to technical matters, or even to elaborate staging, that the clarity of presentation has suffered, not to mention the depths explored and expressed by actors inhabiting their parts.

Another graph wonders "How it is that Thornton Wilder who radically challenged form and was an inventor and outlier was transformed by intellectual opinion into a treacly sentimentalist for the masses?" She wonders "How to reclaim the dead and enjoyed-by-many and put them back in their proper place as radicals..."

Good questions, but I also wonder if both of Wilder's reputations--as a has-been sentimentalist and a has-been experimentalist--prevents more theatres from doing his plays. Or is it just the large casts? That shouldn't stop university theatres. Though I hesitate to call for doing plays and playwrights that theatres don't do because they know they'd do them badly, I would like to experience some Wilder (The Skin of Our Teeth might be topical now), Shaw, Ibsen, Arthur Miller again--along with more fashionable plays and playwrights.

Does This Explain It All?

I'm fascinated with a dialogue in the March/April issue of the Dramatist, in which playwrights Marsha Norman ('Night, Mother, and--among other works, the book and for the musical The Secret Garden, seen recently at Ferndale Rep) and Christopher Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, which coincidentally was also on stage at the Rep recently, performed by the teen ensemble.)

They were talking about a playwrighting class they taught together at the Julliard School in New York. The students, described as a year or two out of college (grad students then?), numbered only four in the beginning, though the next year another class of four was added to the four who remained for a second year.

After describing how they came to teach the class together, the playwrights talked about their approach and how things worked out. Early on, Marsha Norman described the effect of the second year students on the first years': "They're also very good about helping the first year writers learn to talk in the Julliard way. We really do speak about plays in a very particular language, to the point that when they leave us they go out and start writers' groups and still kind of travel in this pack. Which is great, because what you need as a writer is to feel that you're in some kind of group that's going to help you. You can't make it if you're out there by yourself."

There is no denying the truth of those words I've put in bold. But the spectre of a pre-elite is pretty stark, as is the danger of groupthink. Going to "the right schools" is pretty much defined by the advantage those schools provide, not just in excellent teaching but in excellent connections. Theatre is susceptible to this, especially since it requires that people work together. Actors need producers need playwrights need directors need each other. Right now the road to success in American theatre (as well as TV and movies) often runs through Julliard, Yale Drama, Carnegie Mellon and no more than a half dozen other programs. (Here on the North Coast, it runs through Dell'Arte, and in design and technical areas, HSU. )

Those eight students are likely to be among the most serious and most talented, but they are also most likely to be from upper middle class big city families. Now they are being formed into packs, which will hurt them a little (if they come up against other gangs) but will help them much, much more.

There are other ways to form and become part of groups that support and advise each other. The young black playwright from HSU, John ADEkoje, is now plugged into a couple of strong support groups: Boston University, which has a production arm in the Boston Playwrights Theatre, and an informal but very involved group of black playwrights on the East Coast.

The summer Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center in Connecticut also was an institutional support mechanism, which re-generated and broadened itself every summer with a dozen or so new playwrights from various backgrounds and parts of the country. That's much less the case there now, and it's more of a pre-elite situation. O'Neill participants never forgot each other, or what they learned there: not only how to approach plays, but how to support each other.


This isn't all that interests me in this dialogue. Norman and Durang have interesting things to say about how they approach the class, which also suggest what playwrighting and theatre are like these days. The playwrights are encouraging, positive and supportive, but they try to get the student to focus on some practical matters. Norman suggests that "On page eight you have to tell the audience when they can go home," meaning that early in play, the audience should know what the question is that the play is asking, so when it is answered, the play is over.

"Rules" like this are distillations of experience, and I especially like suggestions that get writers (and others involved) to think about what they're doing from the audience perspective. August Wilson told me that one of the most useful pieces of advice he got at the O'Neill was to make sure that at the beginning of the play, the audience knows where the action is, and when. It's very simple, but it's smart, because if the audience is trying to figure that out, they miss what else is going on. And we all make sense of things based on time and place.

Something else that emerged from this class I learned at the O'Neill and elsewhere: it is very useful for a playwright to see the play read by actors, and to get actor feedback, because it is usually specific to their character, or to how that character might or might not say something. That's another major advantage of a place like Julliard, which attracts excellent acting students.

Another "tool" that Marsha Norman uses also suggests that not everything works for every play. To test the attraction or power of a play idea, she has everyone write five sentences about their play ("This is a play about___. It takes place___. The main character wants___. It begins when___. It ends when___. ) Then after each 5 sentence summary is read, students are asked which ones they remember (other than their own.) Norman says that out of 20, the most that are remembered is usually five. And then she asks, which would you pay to see? The money question, in both senses. Usually it's one, or two.

Two would be about right. It's the ten percent rule which governs the arts, and possibly a lot more. When he was director of the O'Neill, Lloyd Richards told me that it's uncannily consistent: of the plays that come in, 10% are passed on by the first readers. Then 10% of those are considered worthy by the judges. And so on.

But I wonder if this exercise doesn't have some pitfalls. I'd like to see added to the mix those five sentence descriptions of a few other plays, like say Waiting for Godot. It would be interesting to see if it makes the cut. (Maybe it's worth mentioning in this regard that Christopher Durang told me that the reason he stopped sending plays to the O'Neill was that he was afraid the first readers would screen him out and he'd be crushed.)

But this isn't to criticize their teaching techniques. I'm frankly in awe of the whole thing--of the attention and care they give, the discussions they have about every student's work. But I'm also very aware of the many of us who never got and never will get that kind of attention and support.

Critical Mess

The Jan/Feb issue of The Dramatist magazine (Journal of the Dramatists Guild) focuses on critics, with an essay by Robert Brustein, an article sampling how playwrights cope with reviews, and featuring a roundtable discussion among New York critics (from the New York Times, Village Voice, Newsday) chaired by playwright Edward Albee.

So this discussion was New Yorkcentric, and also mostly about reviewing new plays (since playwrights form the Dramatist Guild membership.) But it's interesting anyway. The roundtable and other articles noted that theatre criticism is dying out, partly as a consequence of theatre continuing to drop back in the pack of entertainment media, and partly because newspapers and magazines are dying, or just getting crazy. They also noted that theatre reviews are often temporary jobs assigned willy nilly to up and coming journalists, who would actually rather be reviewing restaurants. Everyone--including these top critics--wish reviewers were better versed in theatre, and that there were more who were playwrights.

So how do I stack up, I wonder. My experience in theatre is not extensive, but I do have some, and I've seen a lot of plays in a lot of different places over the years. And I am enough of a playwright to actually qualify as a member of the Dramatist Guild (didn't keep up with the dues, though.) I do believe in theatre. And I have no interest in reviewing restaurants.

But though the panel provided a dour assessment of criticism, they were even more worried about playwriting. Michael Feingold of the Village Voice--who also was a dramaturg at the O'Neill Center in its glorious past--was particularly negative about the commercial and development pressures visited on playwrights, way before critics get involved, with compromised and homogenized results. "I have to say to my regret, that I think the playwrights who have learned how to tailor their sensibility to all the compromises are the ones that get produced," he said.

Well, the theatre can endure moronic critics, or just critics who get it wrong now and then. But it can't survive too many pre-ruined plays.

As for playwright Edward Albee, he is most vocal on the topic of critics who don't understand the theatre well enough. But he begins the discussion by quoting an editor of the New York Times in an exchange about reviewing with him and Arthur Miller. "He said the most extraordinary sentence to me. He said, 'We are much more interested in serving our readers than we are the theatre.'"

Edward Albee is a great playwright and a provocative gadfly. I met him once briefly and he was extraordinarily pleasant and generous. While the editor expressed himself a bit crassly (or Albee wrote the dialogue that way), what he says suggests a simple truth that shouldn't be surprising. Albee should no more be shocked that critics write primarily for readers than to hear that playwrights write primarily for audiences.

We all write for multiple audiences. One of my first newspaper editors (when I was a rock critic--but never a restaurant critic) told me that I should write for three audiences: my readers, my editor and myself. But he was being a little disingenuous: we are all aware of, and have some responsibility to, the people we are writing about, and the institution involved (broadly speaking; "the theatre" or "theatre community" for example.) That responsibility begins with accuracy, and includes fairness. In criticism, it also includes honesty.

A play review is taken by those who participate in the production as a critique. Their own critiques of their work--and each other's--is often far harsher than any review I've written, as I've noted. But this one is public. They also evaluate reviews for its effect on publicity and personal glory and career. There isn't a lot a reviewer can do about all of that except be honest in recording responses to the production on the date it was experienced, and to be as clear and fair as possible.

But I would be surprised to learn that most of the readers of theatre reviews have gone to see, or will go to see, the production reviewed. I'm pretty sure that a large part of the readership of a review or theatre column is comprised of readers who aren't going to see the show, no matter what the review says. For them, the review is a piece they read in the newspaper that they hope is informative and entertaining.

But even for those who will see the show--or who are deciding if they will--the review has its own integrity: it is a piece of writing in print in a newspaper, just like the other stories in that issue. The primary job of a writer for a newspaper is to try to provide the best reading experience for readers of that newspaper. Just as the playwright--or anyone involved in a show--is trying to put on the best play they can for the audience that shows up to see it.

There are ways to do that badly, of course--attempted pandering, gratuitous violence, etc. But that's beneath contempt for any kind of article or review. It's something of a balancing act, which I take seriously. But to some extent we're all in show business.

Talk

The first season of The West Wing created symphonies of dialogue that stirred television and led to multiple Emmy awards--and it all began with a kid who watched plays just to hear the people talk.

We've been watching The West Wing on DVD, beginning from the beginning. What a treat to re-watch this truly great series--one of the three or four best ever--without commercials, and with subtitles (they talk so fast that I often had to tape episodes just so I could watch them later and catch what I missed.)

For the uninitiated, The West Wing aired for 7 seasons beginning in 2000, and centered on the West Wing of the White House. I'll leave the political commentary it inspires for another blog. Here I want to mention something about the series that was said on one of the "special feature" featurettes on the final DVD of season 1. (The special features are terrific, the episode commentaries not so much. Producer/director Tommy Schlame and writer Aaron Sorkin do the commentaries but don't actually say much, except how neat it is to see an episode they hadn't seen in awhile. Sorkin especially wants people to shut up and listen to the dialogue.)

The series had fine acting by Martin Sheen as President Bartlet and an ensemble cast, but it got its spark and notoriety from the writing of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote all but one of the show's first 88 episodes, to the end of its fourth season. As cast members in one of the featurettes note, they soon learned to speak Sorkin's scripts word for word, because everything was in the language. The words were not only precise for comedic and dramatic moments, but in weaving the episodes together.

Now here's the comment that jumped out at me. Sorkin said that his parents started taking him to the theatre at an early age, and even before he understood the stories, he loved the dialogue, and how they created symphonies of words. It was the dialogue he heard in plays that inspired him to write.

If you know The West Wing, you know it is dialogue-driven. It's people in rooms--and famously, walking between rooms--talking. Talk became the music that made a multiple Emmy-award winning television series.

A couple of days after I first saw this featurette, I happened to read a review of a volume of Gore Vidal's essays in the New York Review of Books. The review writer, Jonathan Raban, noted that Vidal began as a playwright, and that his experience writing dramatic (and comedic) dialogue became the distinctive voice of his essays. "His best essays are aural performances," Raban writes. "...I can think of no other modern writer, with the possible exception of the playwright Alan Bennett, in his published diaries, who has succeeded as well as Vidal in transforming lines of cold print into an instantly audible speaking voice."

So having been hit over the head with this point twice, I got it: dialogue--words, talk--on stage can become the essence of an individual and successful voice in other media, like television and print.

But this point tends to reinforce another that I also read this week, which gently suggests that talk is as important--possibly more important--in theatre than the visual and conceptual elements that tend to dominate these days. Shakespeare was the specific case in point, and the matter of assigning some priority in staging and direction to making it easier for audiences to hear those words.

Now where did I read that bit...? Oh yes, in my column in the Journal. So here's the relevant passage, with a few more words...

Northcoast Prep doing King Lear got me thinking about Ronald Harwood’s play, The Dresser (also a movie with Albert Finney), which was about a small Shakespeare company playing the English provinces during World War II, based loosely on Donald Wolfit, reputedly one of the great Lears of the century. He was a last exemplar of the “actor/manager” school, and the theatrical style emphasizing the star, declaiming the great Shakespeare parts.

That rejected style had its excesses, but as a general comment, today’s emphasis on concepts and creating “stage pictures” may have gone too far in other directions. Those old-style actors knew how to make sure they were seen and heard clearly. They created the stage equivalent of close-ups. It’s really not that Shakespeare’s language is so difficult; just that there’s a lot of it. Instead of devising distractions, I’m in favor of making it easier to see and hear the words spoken.

That's partly a matter of projection and diction, but it is also a matter of making sure the speaker is seen. That's something those old actors of the classics knew in their very experienced bones: in order to be heard, the words must be seen. Not in phony hand gestures, but in the faces of the speaker.

"Hotel Cassiopeia" by Charles Mee at the Court
Theatre in 2006.

Quoth

"People just think that structure is something separate from what they have to say, but the way we structure what we have to say is maybe the most fundamental part of how we see the world. If you think A causes B causes C causes D, then that's what you believe. If you think A causes B causes Purple causes 136 and then shit happens, then that's your structure. It's really a vision of what you think life is and nobody can tell you what that should be."

playwright Charles Mee in The Dramatist (July/August 2008.) His work can be found at charles mee.org.

Age Matters

The March/April issue of the Dramatist (publication of the Dramatists Guild) begins with letters that refer back to a column that argues that older playwrights, and not just young ones, might write worthwhile plays. That column said: "Look, no one likes to age, especially the artistic child within you. But with that glorious aging comes more wisdom, more experience with craft, more experience with relationships" etc. Letters responding to it came from people in their forties and even seventies who don't have established playwriting careers but who are writing plays and trying to get them produced anyway.

The editors called the response "overwhelming," which generally means it is responding to a point of view unheard of before. The idea has apparently become gospel that at least among the non-famous (but possibly extending to the formerly famous as well), only the young can write plays. Anyone not young is illegitimate, foolish and should be ashamed of themselves, which probably they are. So a bunch of people wrote in to say, not so fast.

I come at this issue from an older perspective, but also from my own youth in an apparently different time. While I had terrible panics and despair over the possibility that I wouldn't "make it" as a writer until, could it be possible, my 30s, and I believed that my youth gave me a particular perspective on my times, I would still have easily accepted the idea that older writers were legitimate, and could have greater perspective based on experience as people and as writers. It stands to reason.

But apparently it is now a minority argument, because doors are largely closed to older playwrights--meaning 40 and up. There are contests, fellowships, opportunties for young writers. Even if it isn't made explicit by rule, new means under 30 or maybe 35. It's not just in the theatre--I remember a San Francisco Chronicle book critic who shocked the literary world by countering the many annual"best writers under 35" lists with his "best new writers over 50." But he only did it once.

There are reasons why the new stage is dominated by young playwrights. University students are virtually the only subsidized playwrights in America, although they are often subsidizing themselves by means of student loans. They are instructed, coached, mentored and produced. In a community like this one, they are pretty much the only new original plays anyone sees. This happens because the university has turned the arts (and related fields, like journalism) into profit centers, and the university has become the chief employer of writers, including those playwrights who aren't writing movies or TV shows.

Once out of their undergrad and graduate programs, young playwrights have a certain amount of time to devote to the theatre, during which years they either get produced and noticed and become part of the theatre-Hollywood-university system, or they don't, and get on with not being poor anymore.

These days, with many in the huge baby boomer generation retiring on possibly the last dependable pensions there will be for awhile, there are likely to be more writers and playwrights in their 50s, 60s, etc. who can subsidize themselves. Presumably institutions will respond to that, although so far they aren't. The only allowable topic for older writers is being old. As long as they make fun of it.

There is the additional question of audience for theatre, which is generally older, and whether a predominantly young perspective serves them all that well.

But what is really shocking about this debate is that there is a question involved as to the legitimacy of the non-young playwright's perspective. All you have to do is go to student plays and however charming and even insightful they are, it's clear the writers don't have very much to write about, or much perspective on it. The argument for craft is more complicated, but it seems obvious that while young writers can excel by instinct, talent, originality and enthusiasm--as well as the "first thought, best thought" phenomenon--there is something to be said for craft gained by experience crafting.

Of course the theatre needs youth to replenish itself (and to move the sets.) Still, there's institutional prejudice against the not-young in the theatre as well as most everywhere else. But you know, the theatre--and most everything else--is missing something, something important, something it needs.

Critic vs. Playwright vs. Critic

It's an old story, but always interesting when it's revived. It's also usually a New York story, as it mostly is this time. First the Critic--Charles Isherwood of the New York Times--wrote a piece urging playwrights who'd gone to Hollywood to write for TV to use their downtime during the current Writer's Guild strike to return to writing plays for the theatre.

He probably meant it as a "light" and clever, gently chiding little piece, but writers on strike don't find much humor in it, and one playwright--Jon Robin Baitz--took umbrage on other accounts as well. In the process, he goes after the New York Times critics with some precise criticism of his own.

Both pieces are very interesting reading, especially Baitz's. He calls for critics to have some humility, and I can't argue with that. But I don't read these New York Times critics much so I don't know about his specific characterizations of them. I was interested, however, that among the "good" critics he names by contrast he includes former NY Times critic Frank Rich (someone I did and do read, someone in fact I knew and worked with, and about whom there will be more here very soon). Because when playwrights complained about critics a couple of cycles ago, they were often complaining the most about Frank Rich, who they dubbed the Butcher of Broadway. Those castigations were mostly unjustifed then; I have no idea if Baitz is right about the critics there now.

But what Baitz says about the real lives of playwrights is important, and important for those interested in American theatre to know, including (if not especially) critics and writers about theatre. Check it out.

First Principles

Let Playwrights Be Playwrights

In general, "play development" is work done on the text of a play before it is produced, so it has to do principally with the playwright and the writing. There are two kinds of play development that make sense to me: in an academic setting, where students works on the plays they're writing with a teacher or mentor, and when the playwright refines the script in the course of getting it ready for a production. And even these require some caveats.

These days, play development has also come to mean a torturous path with many pitfalls for the playwright and the play, as the process becomes more concerned with money, and is increasingly often prolonged to produce income for the people or entity in charge of "developing."

Playwright Richard Nelson spoke about this process, and excerpts were published in American Theatre magazine. He goes at the primary assumption first: "what a playwright writes, no matter how much he or she works on it...the play will always be not right--will always need help. In other words, writing a play is too big of a job for just the playwright to achieve. This, I believe, is now a prevalent attitude in the American theatre. And this mindset is devastating."

As a result, Nelson said, playwrights who want to be produced know they have to submit to this process, and so "why finish anything?" He says that young playwrights tell him they purposely include badly written sections so that the "help" will be directed there, and not the parts of the play they care about.

The "help" by theatres comes about sometimes in commissions, which pay the playwright for the first draft and then for the rewrite, but basically the "help" is done to earn "participation"--that is, the piece of the play's profits in subsequent productions. This has become a new feature of the nonprofit theatre--a theatre that invests its time in "helping" gets some of the playwright's money if the play goes on to, say, Broadway. So if playwrights want their new play produced, they must go through this process of being helped, whether they want it or not, and then they pay for it, and keep on paying for it. Nelson thinks this stinks.

But that's not Nelson's only objection--he feels the process makes mediocre plays. A script is subjected to so many judgments--from producers, literary managers, dramaturgs, etc.--usually applying conventional wisdom about the rules for a good play. "Rules for writing plays. My god! One hears young playwrights being told what a play 'must do' or 'how a play works.' One hears writers being told that a character's 'journey' isn't clear enough, or that the writer needs to determine a character's 'motivation.' One hears how a play has to 'build' in a certain way, or how 'the conflict' isn't strong enough. These are terms that seem to suggest a deep understanding of what a play is and how it is put together, but in fact they tell us very little."

They're too general, for one thing, and they don't always apply. "To see how silly this prescription is, one has only to ask: What is the clear motivation of Lear?"

"The playwright doesn't write out of motivations but rather out of truth and reality, out of people and story and worlds he or she wishes or needs to create for us," Nelson counters. Plays can be written to formula, but they are formula plays. Sooner or later, plays are shaped by these conventional wisdoms, and they begin to all be alike. Even the process of play development itself has a leveling effect: Nelson says that since new plays are routinely subjected to mandatory readings first, but some plays--especially plays with lots of characters interacting but not always talking--don't come alive in readings. So playwrights write plays that do, for their own survival.

A certain style of play development has always been part of the American commercial theatre, but the route from nonprofit to larger commercial productions hasn't always been to the play's benefit. In Hot Seat, his collection of theatre reviews for the New York Times, Frank Rich remarks that "almost every play" that was transferred to Broadway from regional or Off Broadway theatres "was the worse for wear." Often this had to do with losing key actors or glitzing up the set, but sometimes it was the rewriting.

The exceptions he notes are plays by Tom Stoppard and August Wilson. How each of these playwrights approaches "development" is well documented. Though August Wilson took his plays through the O'Neill Center process (and later did say he felt pressured from time to time to be more conventional) he also always remained in charge of his own process, and the result. Later in his career, he rewrote solely on the basis of what he saw in rehearsals. Tom Stoppard does the same. In both cases, they rewrite not on the basis of "help"--though they both gratefully took suggestions from actors, directors and even onlookers--but on the basis of how the play was working as it was being brought alive, for that's the difference in playwrighting: it isn't just on the page. It has to work on the stage.

But what works on stage is also measured by what the world the playwright is creating. That may be a very eccentric world, and in this there is resemblance to other creative writing. Writing in the New Yorker about a new series of abridged classics, Adam Gopnik found the abridged version of Moby Dick was a perfectly serviceable novel--- "by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved," which means "a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters--the 'taut, spare driving' narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers."

The problem is, he writes, it's not Moby Dick. Melville didn't write "just a thrilling adventure with unforgettable characters but a great book. The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book."

There are lots of non-masterpieces that are only crazy, of course. But Gopnik concludes that "masterpieces are inherently a little loony." Can a masterpiece survive development? It's a question well worth asking.