|
The playwright for Dreams in a Golden Country talks about her beginnings and her creative process as a playwright.
What inspired you to become a writer, particularly, a playwright?
Well, when I was a kid, my mother took me to the theater all the time. She
was an actress. I would watch her rehearse. She quit pretty early on in my life,
but I had a great love of the theatre. She then sent me to—when I was sixteen—to
a summer stock company in Connecticut. But I never wanted to be an actor. I
was much too self-conscious. But I thought it might be fun to be a playwright.
When I went to college I majored in English, but I did start writing and dialogue
seemed much more natural to me than writing prose at the time. At some point,
that's what got me started.
Can you share some of your first experiences as a playwright?
Some of my first experiences were with small plays—one acts. To my great
good fortune, they got produced. Early on, I got together with three friends
and we formed an organization which we called the Minnesota Playwriting Center.
It is now called The Playwright Center, and it's for people who are writing
for the stage. We did two things—we tried out our work on each other and
we invited criticism. And we could serve as a sort of a fulcrum to get theaters
to produce our work.
Could you talk about your writing process? How and where do you begin
to write a play?
When I’m writing my own, it is very often not fully laid out. It could
be as small as a sound which I hear. Once I wrote a play because I heard the
sound of a windchime on a terrace, and I wanted to put it in a play. The look
of a bleak, icy desert, which is contradicted by two antique chairs sitting
in the middle of an iceberg. A look can inspire me to go and write a play. I
don't often start with messages. I think that's usually death to a dramatist.
But very soon I get characters in my mind—who these people are—and
I do, at some point, outline a story. I have to know where it's going to end
when I start it. And that is what my process is.
Could you talk more about messages as death to a dramatist?
A lot of my plays have messages. Political messages about environment, or whatever.
Racism. But if you start there, it doesn't work. You have to start with real
people and a real story and not belabor the idea of a message. It will get there
and will be much more effective if you don't work on it. Polemic doesn't work
in the theatre very well.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
I think the best thing to do is to work. Go be a gopher in a theater, in a
community theater, in a small professional theater. Watch what happens when
something written on a piece of paper suddenly stands up and becomes three-dimensional.
That's the biggest lesson. And in terms of the characters, I suppose that is
the same as it would be for a novelist. You have to know who they are, what
they had for breakfast. If they catch a butterfly, do they pull the wings off,
do they preserve it or they free it? You have to know a lot about them, and
their responses to comic things are, and what their serious interests are and
so forth.
|
