Playwriting is a dying art—or so I’ve been told by several rather successful Brown MFA playwrights and graduates, though not without a self-ironic chuckle.
However, to any keen observer of the recent theatre scene at Brown, flourishing may seem like a better description. Last weekend, three theatre stages at Brown were occupied with the rehearsals and showings of new, student-written work.
In Stuart Theatre, rehearsals were at full throttle for Brown-Brokers’ new student-written musical Leavittsburg, OH. With less than two weeks until opening, they had just secured a final draft of the second act, with a new song still underway. The volatile nature of a work-in-progress is what allows the playwright’s creativity to meet and respond to ideas and problems as they arise in the rehearsal room.
At PW, the annual mini playwriting festival 3C2C drew a full house to a performance of four short pieces selected from twenty-something contributions. All plays were inspired by the prompt as reflected in the title: 3 chairs 2 cubes. For the record, there seemed to be more sofas than chairs in the room, and not nearly enough cubes. But any negligence of facts or failing memory can be overlooked for the sake of theatricality. All of the showcased plays demonstrated intimate portrayals of human behavior under well-defined circumstances. Amidst the absurdities and pleasures of fairy-dust, funerals, furry drivers, and an elongated falling from the sky, one play especially, Bruce Springsteen Misreads the National Mood in His Halftime Performance stood out by weaving a suffocating matrix of naïveté and looming exploitation.
At Rites and Reason, the RPM play-lab readings raised more interesting questions about theatre development. The Research-to-Performance Method engages playwrights in a process that marries scholarly research with artistic creation. Because Brown students often have strong investments in performance as well as in socio-cultural-political discourse, the merging of the two seems both relevant and challenging.
What are the implications of writing a play through research? My friends with RPM-experience tell me that RPM-playwriting evolves around a thesis statement which you spend a considerable amount of time and energy formulating and researching before beginning the writing process. However, while the writing is informed by external sources, the subject matters tend often to be close to the heart. As one playwright points out, research lies as much in books as in lived experience.
I got my own taste of the RPM-process as a director for a staged reading of Liz Morgan’s RPM-play SkInDeep. After an initial read-through, the whole cast spent a good hour and a half discussing the play—not just what it demanded in terms of plot or staging, but drawing on our own gut-reactions and questions to interrogate the characters and their functions. Throughout the week-long rehearsal process, Liz continuously made revisions, even writing a new scene to add dimension to a character we felt to be too flat. Then came the reading, followed by a folk-thought in which audience members shared what they found compelling, confusing, distracting, or upsetting. The understanding that the play itself was a work-in-progress allowed the conversation to flow with an unmediated frankness and generosity, avoiding the frequent stiltedness of talk-backs in which no one really knows how the ‘talking back’ should happen.
Last weekend, I gained tremendous respect for all the RPM-playwrights who so graciously and willingly took in comments. It is not easy to put your academic work and your heart on display for the public, and have it commented upon in one sitting.
Playwriting at Brown is very much alive and tasty—make sure you get a full-
flavored bite. Need I mention that variety is always better for digestion?
