The Play’s the Thing: On Becoming an Inadvertent Playwright

I never set out to be a playwright. My poetry and music careers, such as they are, already sputter and lurch along. Did I need more disappointment and headache?

Not only had I barely thought about being a playwright, I may not have even realized until a few years ago that we don’t spell it “playwrite.” If that weren’t damning enough, the first play that I published and had produced was based on a lie.

For years I’d taught a class called Poems and Plays through OASIS, a learning organization for senior retired adults. They are a fantastic group of students, not only writing publishable work, but many of them actually publishing it. Keeping them challenged is a challenge.

At some point, I ran out of plays. After exhausting the reserves from my own books, from the shelves of colleagues, and at St. Louis Public—and rather than repeating work already discussed or showing up to class empty-handed—I decided to write one myself, then disguise it as the work of an established playwright.

The requirements seemed simple enough. Since it was a class of seniors, put in some old people. There aren’t enough characters for older actors, readers, and audience members anyway. The other necessary thing? Make it funny. My class loves to laugh, especially humor about aging, death, and sex. Rarely has work been too dark or too risqué for this bunch.

So I came up with a funny situation, and immediately two characters materialized—two old women, neighbors, in a small Midwestern town, one of them finding a mysterious brown paper bag in her back yard. The rest was strangely easy.

The play is called Bang! and I banged the first draft out in a few minutes. I can’t even take credit for this play. It wrote itself. The characters wrote it. I was a fly on the wall, and in one quick rush on a yellow pad, I jotted down what I heard.

These old ladies made me laugh. They surprised me. I sent it to a few friends for feedback. One was mystified, a couple had some suggestions, and one other loved it. That was all the encouragement I needed to revise some more, to work on the timing a bit, take out some of the repetition, make it a little smoother.

Using a fake name, one of the many aliases I use for songwriting and life in general, I brought Bang! to class. The students took parts and performed a reading around the table, as we did with all the plays I’d brought, and they performed it brilliantly. They laughed where I’d hoped they would—and where I hadn’t expected. And being terrific critics as well as writers, they had useful suggestions for my next rewrite.

I did one more draft before the editor of a literary magazine called Poems & Plays asked me for some poems for their final issue. The journal had published some of my earliest work, and many other poems throughout the years, so I sent him my favorite as-yet unpublished poems for my forthcoming book, All the Wasted Beauty of the World. At the last second, I attached the play on a whim.

A few days later, he wrote back to say he wanted to publish the play, that it had really surprised him. It surprised me, too. Finding homes for those poems so close to the publication date of my book would prove difficult, but I was happy he found something he liked.

Apparently I was a playwright. Using the same method—getting out of the way as the author and transcribing what I heard the characters say—I wrote three more short plays. All these characters talking in my head made playwriting a lot less lonely than poetry.

On another whim, I sent two of these plays to short festivals. The North Park Playwright Festival in San Diego produced Bang! a few weeks ago. This week, First Run Theater’s Spectrum Festival will stage Bang! and No Other Gods Before Me.

I was unable to attend any productions in San Diego, but I wanted to spy on at least one rehearsal here in St. Louis, and see what they had done with my plays. As with the creation of the script, I hoped to be unobtrusive, another fly on the wall. The director of No Other Gods Before Me, Krystal Stevenson, welcomed me to come by. When I first walked through the doors, I immediately heard my own words uttered from the stage and projected throughout the theater.

“I can give you progeny,” said some guy playing Chemosh.

“To worship him!” said some woman playing Magog.

It was like walking into my own head. The characters were suddenly given breath, literally made flesh and blood, yelling and smooching on stage.

When they finished the scene, all three actors and the director looked at me. Who was this stranger in the hat invading their safe world? The director introduced me, and the guy playing Chemosh, Don McClendon, literally crouched and hid behind another actor, and cried, “Aii! It’s the author!”

So much for anonymity. I reassured them I wanted to be unobtrusive and just wanted to watch, and hoped they’d forget about me. I think they did. Chemosh had a mental block on one particular line, and broke character once in frustration, pounding his forehead, saying “What’s the stupid line?” It was the line that carried the title of the play, and I admit I bristled at first when he called it stupid.

All three actors and the director surprised me, and when Sophia Murillo delivered Ron’s key moment, the turn of the play, I was so moved I could feel tears start to well up in my eyes. Is it narcissistic when the people in your own head move you to tears? It was her performance more than my words, though. All three actors built fully furnished rooms on my scaffolding—both like and unlike what I had imagined. I had conceived of Chemosh as Middle Eastern, not African-American, but Don did him so well, with a deep, rich, godlike voice and perfect comedy, that now I have trouble seeing him any other way. And I had initially imagined Magog as angrier, but Marilyn Bass-Hayes’s lofty and otherworldly take worked at least as well, in retrospect probably better than an angry, four-breasted goddess ranting across the stage.

It reminded me of seeing skilled debaters on opposite sides of an issue. Well, that sounds pretty convincing—oh, no, that’s definitely true—each side volleying “truth” from podium to podium. In this case, the actors and director convinced me of the rightness of their interpretation of my own work.

After several more run-throughs, the actors came down from the stage. I shook their hands and told them how impressed I was. Perhaps taking me at my word that I didn’t want to interfere and critique them, they asked me questions—how did I come up with this play, did they capture what I had in mind, did they get it right?

Neither Bang! nor No Other Gods Before Me are what you you’d call “morality plays.” In fact, most people would probably think of them as a bit dark. But I did take away a bit of a moral from all this.

First, I relearned what my old teacher, poet Don Finkel used to tell me. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, man. Poems, stories, essays, plays, whatever—it’s all poems, it’s all writing. Just do it, do it all.” Writing plays has kept me writing when I might have stopped out of frustration with the Po Biz, as Don called it. It’s a lot less lonely, and not just from the characters keeping you company in your head, but the collaborative element of playwriting.

Which brings me to the second lesson: surrender. It took me years to get this, but I learn it every day with my bandmates, The CharFlies, who take the blueprint of a song and make it better than I’d imagined. The same works for plays. If I’d attended rehearsals during the early phases, before the actors had a handle on their characters, before the director could hear what worked and didn’t work, I’d have offered all kinds of helpful suggestions that would have screwed everything up. It’s hard to be objective now. The play is just like I imagined it, only better. The play is nothing like I’d imagined it, and better for it. Both of these statements are true.

Now I feel even more that I didn’t write these plays—certainly not the final versions on stage for the Spectrum Festival. They were collaborative projects with the directors, set designer, costume designer, lighting designer, the actors, my friends who gave comments, the OASIS class who first read it out loud. And the further I’ve moved from the initial conception, the more I feel like I never wrote those plays to begin with. Some lucky fly did. And now that fly is praying he can land on more walls before someone swats him.

Richard Newman’s most recent poetry collection is All the Wasted Beauty of the World (Able Muse Press, 2014). He has served as editor of River Styx for 20 years, plays in the junk-folk band The CharFlies, and lives in the Tower Grove East neighborhood.

Spectrum 2014: New Short Plays by St. Louis Area Playwrights runs November 7 through 16. All performances take place at the Theatre at Southampton Presbyterian Church, 4716 Macklind. Tickets are $12, $10 for seniors and students, and can be purchased online. For more information, call 314-352-5114, email [email protected], or visit the website or the Facebook event page.