From Reading to Rewrite: A Peek at How Self-Produced Plays Change
“I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.”
Leo Tolstoy
Readings help rewritings. The generous adventurous people who come to the reading of a new play help to shape its next iteration through both their reactions in the moment — laughs, gasps, silences, even groans sometimes - and what they were willing to tell afterwards. But even before the audience steps into your reading room, the actors and the director have animated the characters in such a way that the idea of the play can never be quite the same as it appeared on the page beforehand. Both groups — creators and observers — prove critical at this stage of making theater live.
At the reading of our new comedy, RETROSPECTIVE, we received a great deal of valuable feedback. At the gathering after the reading, I like to say that I consumed 3 beers and 33 opinions. The play provides an example of the role of readings and rewriting in self-producing a play. I cannot imagine any play that does not benefit from rewriting. But how does that happen in the self-producing process? I’ll show you an example at the bottom of this chapter.
“I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything.”Kenzaburo Oe
This pdf at the end of this post constitutes the thirteenth draft of our latest play, which counting the film we made of scenes for our first play Alms is our tenth production since reentering theater in 2018. And rewriting played an important role in each of those instances, but that’s nothing unusual or new in this field.
In fact, Quote Investigator led me to one of the earliest proponents of rewriting plays: Steele MacKaye, who was a highly popular U.S. playwright and actor of the 19th Century. In July 1889, MacKaye published in several newspapers a piece titled “ How Plays Are Written: They Are the Product of Study and Patient Toil “. The first line presented his thesis. Emphasis added:
Plays are not written-they are rewritten.
In this lies the advantage of the creative, as distinct from the critical, literature of the stage.
One more time: “Plays are not written-they are rewritten”
QI goes on to note that “ by 1894 the saying had been reassigned to the Irish actor and playwright Dion Boucicault, and by 1903 W. S. Gilbert had been assigned a variant referring to comic operas. Yet, the earliest evidence currently points to Steele MacKaye as crafter of the statement. “ Of course, others would take credit for this wisdom, which also serves as a caution to beginner playwrights: don’t think this process is like a 100 yard dash. Getting a play into its produceable form is more like an ultramarathon relay race in which you must keep passing the baton to yourself, but there are bathroom breaks.
Let’s trim that quote of MacKaye a little; Plays Are the Product of Study and Patient Toil. This is especially true for self-produced plays, and the rewriting of such enterprises differs from other development schemes for plays. As a bonus way of looking at self-producing, I argue that such work provides more opportunities for a playwright to refine their text through rewriting.
This not to demean the many opportunities to help a playwright revise their new script outside of self-producing: dramaturgs, workshops, New Play Exchange, etc. But when you are the producer of the play, your contact with others is perhaps wider and richer than it would be as someone who luckily has had a submitted script accepted for the next stage of development.
Being the self-producer in my experience rendered me more open to suggestions from actors. Why? Self-producing means self-interest squared. The calculus of how the play can be successful necessitates a collaboration that is authentic. The self-producing playwright may have even greater motivation to have each one of the actors be fully engaged. I don’t think that happens unless the collaboration is sincere, and that means the listening to, exploring of, and responding to comments and suggestions about the play must be real, true, not feigned or pretended.
That doesn’t mean that you, the playwright, will take every suggestion; that would be madness and an abdication of the duty to be the final judge of the text. But it does mean that you are in dialogue with these other artists and in doing so learning from their questions and even their complaints. Of course, one of their complaints with me is why do you write so many words? And I always say, I’m just imitating my favorite playwrights like Shaw and Shakespeare and Stoppard. I’m not pretending that I’m as good as they are, but part of what that imitation allows is the courage to let my characters run on, to luxuriate in language, maneuver in making arguments with quality and quantity. And since I have confidence in the eventual audiences that will see the finished product, I’m not afraid of all these things that are said about attention span. I’m willing to hazard that possibility. It drives me to tell a better story, one that will hold each person because they want to know what happens next. But I would be a fool not to ask others what they think about all of this.
Lucas Hnath is a massive rewriter. As D.T. Max observed in a New Yorker piece: “He can sound mystical about his creative process. At workshops, I’ve heard him say many times, ‘ This line hasn’t figured out yet what it wants to become.; But he can also be stringently analytical. Playwright’s Input A should result in Audience Output B. … I asked him what he’d be looking out for that evening [of a preview], and he said that it was important that he not look for anything. He wanted to experience the play as if he’d never seen it. This, he emphasized, would be just the start of his process. “ You have to watch several performances. Then take a step back and try to understand, on average, how the play works. It’s what remains consistent across many performances that tells me something useful. Tonight is one single data point.”
He hoped to next time find “a better spot” in the theatre. Another night found him in the stage manager’s office, listening to the actors on a monitor. He was rewriting their parts as they spoke.”
There are three aspects of rewriting in that story: the intuitive ( This line hasn’t figured out yet what it wants to become), the analytical in checking off whether a particular line or passage elicited the desired reaction; e.g., an expected laugh, a thoughtful frown. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a paragon of effective and glorious storytelling, once said: “ There’s no great art in confusing the reader.” That holds true for the audience member as well, and that’s the third aspect evident in the passage on Hnath above; he is rewriting in the booth as the actors speak their lines because he is sensing where the audience is finding meaning or getting lost, which is different than the analytical look in which he keeps score of whether the reactions were what he planned. This third look arise from his wanting “ to experience the play as if he’d never seen it.”
At least, that’s my take. The next time (first time!) I run into Lucas I’ll factcheck my interpretation and let you know.
“ Frankly, I also don’t want to have to listen to everybody’s views since, based on an ignorance of the overall text, they are only going to be prejudices anyway. Of which, with this subject, there are too many already.”
David Hare, Acting Up
Before I move on to the planning and unfolding of the reading that will lead to this rewriting, we should hear another take that of David Hare whose book Acting Up is one of my holy texts about how theater and specifically performance really work. From the above quote, you might get the sense that David doesn’t use as many people as aids in his rewriting as we did in this reading. (I do not know Hare either, but I consult his book so often it seems like we would be mates over a pint.) But in that same book, he tells a story about how Louis Malle influenced his playwrighting that describes ne way of rewriting that offers many advantages:
“ Louis (Malle) shared my fascination with techniques of storytelling. Once, we were meant to be working together on Damage, the film of Josephine Hart’s novel. But I came into the restaurant for supper usually dissatisfied with that morning’s readthrough of the play of mine called Murmuring Judges. ‘It ought to bloody work,’ I said, ‘and it doesn’t.’ At once Louis asked me to tell him the story of the play. Together we sat for three hours, refining the narrative. Louis isolated every component of the story, and then put them all back together again in the right order. It was like watching a great car mechanic lay out the pieces of an engine on a clean white cloth before reassembling them. He did it for the sheer intellectual pleasure…. (After writing the synopsis of Damage) Every morning he would make me sit down under the vines and go back to the beginning of the story. He did it so many times that I thought I was going to go mad.”
That’s a rewriting occasion at the synopsis stage! You’ll figure out your own way, but if you’re self-producing starting with a reading makes sense for at least four reasons:
$$$: Attendees at a reading might be backers. Such a strategy requires a whole separate chapter.
Marketing: Readings aid this phase of self-producing because through that event you get photo ops, the start of word of mouth, and possible blurbs (e.g., “ this is the best work yet from this playwright “; yes, someone said that at our last reading, which made me wonder what was lacking with the earlier plays). Reading attendees may be your repeat customers; If they liked it at the reading they will often be curious enough to return for the full production.
Given the theme of this chapter, the focus here is on the last two items on the list: Shaping and Exploring. We quote Hilton Als all the time to distinguish between the text and the play:
“ Theatre isn’t real. It’s a refraction of reality, containing feelings and thoughts that are put forth, first, in a primary text, which the actor interprets-an interpretation that the director supports or edits, in an attempt to help build, in a made-up world, an atmosphere of verisimilitude.”
Hilton Als
The reading represents the first chance to see what happens when actors speak that text in front of an audience. You realize what’s too long, too short, really funny, really NOT funny. You get the idea. Singer’s dictum becomes critical: is the audience confused; you can tell a lot by looking at faces and listening to breathing. Allan Gurganus notes that, “ A crucial verb for writers is revise. Which means, of course, to re-see.” The re-seeing that happens here is quite different than the first seeing that spun out in your mind’s eye. As you re-see, you begin to reshape: lines bend, passages disappear, images appear or disappear.
To re-see, you must engage a director actors who will bring your text to its best possible life at this point. You connect to a director who can make the storytelling consistent and as potent as one can manage in front of music stands with no set. This exploration requires actors who have ideas based upon your primary text, notions about their character’s backstory, relationships with other characters, even the cadence of the language that you gave to them. Their questions about moments that are unclear to them or ways in which the structure seems not to work given their new understanding of the story.
Even before these conversations or rehearsals occur with the actors and your director, other preparations for the reading happen: getting a space, sending out scripts, etc. But the most important of these preparations is to gather an audience that likes theater. To paraphrase Singer; there is no great benefit in torturing yourself by inviting to your Chekhovian comedy an audience of people whose usual entertainment diet is thirty second TikTok parodies.
There is the usual housekeeping to address: pick a time that is convenient, send invites that are inviting and grateful, offer directions and cautions if your venue happens to be down a flight of crumbling steps or has a funky buzzer system to get in the front door. Make sure there are enough chairs and music stands. Be prepared to find the bathroom key and make sure there are paper towels there. Every detail increases the comfort of this audience and you want them in a good mood to focus on your play.
We recommend a place for an after-reading gathering. Make it comfortable and convivial. Work that room to get reactions and note them in your phone or on paper. Then consider them in the next few days because not all of them will be useful. After all, this is still your play and you need to decide which of those comments and reactions will help the story versus what will harm it or make it a totally different work.
And then…
The Fruits of Your Labor: A Rewritten Play
“Everything is there in the sauce; it just needs to simmer.”
B. Huvane
The forty people who DID come to the reading only had this context about the subject of the play:
Retrospective concerns a famous painter who may or may not be dreaming of an encounter with his first wife amidst a retrospective of his work and the appearances of others from his past.
With that sparse framework, the rest of this chapter will offer examples of the rewriting. Knowing the whole play is not necessary to appreciate the learnings that the reading produced for us.
If you have the luck to persuade some people with experience in the theater as producers to attend your reading, then you are very lucky indeed. And I must claim humbly that status as at each of my readings experienced Off-Broadway, Broadway, and West End hands have attended and offered substantial constructive reactions. But I’ve also gained critical ideas from causal theatergoers who wanted to see what a new play reading was like. Having this variety is an advantage: listen to everyone. That’s particularly important for self-producers as we need all the support we can muster.
One of those old hands was lavish in his praise of RETROSPECTIVE based on the reading, but wondered what it would be like if the main female character addressed some of her bouts of confusion directly to the audience. I found this compelling and thus our opening notes reflected this change. Will it stick as the play moves to production? Impossible to tell, but whoever reads it next will have the advantage of this context.
Having sat in on the three pre-reading rehearsals, I didn’t need anybody to tell me that the play was too long, but several people did so anyway. You have to develop listening skills; hold the play at arms length for good perusal, don’t let the play hold you. Don’t take criticism personally. A common theme ran through those kind but ‘cutting’ comments: get the secondary female character on to that stage sooner. In fact, one of the people who told me that was the actress who played the secondary female character who is also a collaborator with two of our previous plays. Trusting her, we realized that there was too much business around the beginning and as you can see from the image below of the first page we cut, cut, cut as if this was a slasher movie.
And cut some more…
Rewriting is not just about cutting. Paying attention to the audience lets you know that their attention flags at times. One cause of this is excessive wordplay. In the change pictured below, the shift to emphasize one character’s discomfort with his reflexive taunting of the other combines with her need for ‘the right word’ as a poet. We are still establishing their identities and relationship, but that must happen economically.
Some of the many changes made are like Hnath’s analytical takes described above: Input A (a joke in this case) did not get Output B (a laugh from the audience). So we swapped in other repartee that should work better.
Our goal became losing ten minutes of runtime, which with this 14 point font means ten pages. One way to do that is to look scrupulously at how you can have more show and less tell in the exchanges and action. The cuts below resulted form that feedback.
A pleasant surprise from the audience reactions in the reading was the enjoyment expressed for the poems written and read by the main female character, Pippa. In this case, rather than cutting, we decided to expand one of her poems a little bit. This had the dual advantage of clarifying her personality through her poetry and also allowing the audience more chuckles at these rhymes. Nothing wrong with chuckles in this play.
Two motives manifest in this next illustration of rewriting. The first one is familiar to any writer and was initially offered by a literary savant with a wonderful name for a comic character: Arthur Quiller-Couch. In his still highly relevant book, On The Art of Writing, Q, as he was known, advised, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” Rewriting may involve multiple murders. The one below was justified because a) we need to cut 10 minutes and b) it’s a clever digression that the character, the acerbic critic self-named Z, doesn’t need as by this point everyone knows she is devilishly clever .
One last example of the changes made is a confession to a weakness. I think most playwrights have conversations with their characters or at least become eavesdroppers on such dialogue. In a first draft, the talk goes on and amuses the playwright. But a reading reveals the prosaic nature of some of those exchanges. Cutting them makes things move and that is necessary to have your audience be moved. That’s what happened here.
And with decisions like that, we cut our ten minutes. The process isn’t over, but the shape of the play satisfies, and its overall idea now has passed a test. Self-producing gave us both additional input and added urgency for our rewrite. Want to see for yourself how it turned out? Click on the link below and scroll to the bottom to get the PDF of the current version.
And, yes, we’re always interested in having talks with folks who want to be producers or co-producers or investors helping Knowledge Workings Theater get this play out in front of more audiences. The reading? The rewrites? The capturing of the lessons from self-producing? It’s all about pursuing our impulse, following our motto: make theater live.
Originally published at https://knowledgeworkings.wpcomstaging.com on January 24, 2025.
