PLAYS

  
Playwrights don’t go to the theater like other people. We don’t go on our anniversaries or birthdays; we don’t go because a play got a good review. (Most of us have stopped reading reviews, even reviews of other writers’ plays. It’s a protest.) On the other hand, we don’t stay away because we hear something got a bad review. We go because we want to stay in the conversation about where the theater is going, who’s writing what, and what it all means. Christopher Hampton once told me the difference between British and American playwrights was that British writers were allowed to have their careers. “If nobody likes the new Stoppard, everybody will see it anyway,” he said. American playwrights do this for each other: we see it all anyway, not to see if we like it, just to see what it is. Like our pals the painters, we go to the galleries to see what’s up.

Once in the theater, playwrights have a much better sense than the critics or the general public of who did what in the production. Quite often, we’ll see a play the critics hated, and realize that the direction was actually the problem. Directors rarely get more than a sentence in reviews, but at least we’ll know what the deal was and can say something to the writer. Sometimes we’ll see a play the audience likes, but we don’t respond to. That’s usually fine with us. Critics, however, don’t seem to know the audience is even there, and rarely mention how it responded. This strikes us as odd, to say the least. In any case, we take it all in when we go. We can usually tell by chatting with the ushers whether or not a piece is going to have a long run. We read the Playbill to see if any of the actors were in plays of ours, and we always see people we know, and almost always have a good time, regardless of our dinner or our companions — another respect in which we differ from the regular audience.

The worst thing that can happen when playwrights go to the theater is that we sometimes get jealous. We’ll see a piece and we’ll wonder why that play is up, and ours is not. But we get over that pretty fast. The main thing playwrights understand from very early in their careers is that any successful play is good for everybody. “August: Osage County” is great for playwrights. It’s like Beth Henley’s wonderful play, “Crimes of the Heart.” It reminds people everywhere that they like plays, big plays, and it reminds producers that plays with big casts can make money. It’s reminding playwrights that you have to keep writing ’til you hit a topic that strikes a chord with everybody. But most importantly, it’s reminding people that terrific plays can come from anywhere. Mr. Letts, like Mr. Albee, is making it clear that you don’t have to be 25 to have a hot new play. You can write a big play whenever you have the right stuff to write about. As an artist, you can have that second act that American lives are said to be without.

I love that everybody wants to see this play — professionals, amateurs, wannabes, tourists, professors, insiders, outsiders, athletes, you name it. It’s gotten glowing reviews, and is doing great at the box office. The audience laughs and laughs, and even at 3 1/2 hours, can’t seem to get enough of the vicious Mom and her nasty mouth. I would’ve stayed an extra hour myself if the 4th act were going to be about the men, or we were going to see Bev and the woman from the motel, or Little Charles and Ivy have some time to themselves with the knowledge that they were half-brother and sister. It’s a brawl, this play, a contest to see who’ll remain standing at the end of the night. I didn’t quite buy that the Mother needed comforting at the end, and crept up to the attic to curl up in the lap of the Indian woman who was paid to be there. I felt like this Mom was entitled to a victory lap, or some more drugs, but hey. Sometimes when you’re writing, you just watch what the characters do and write that down, or maybe it was something the actor found. I don’t know. I was just glad all the kids got away.

Another thing I like about this play is that it feels like it was written by Little Charles, the character everybody feels sorry for, the supposedly stupid one who “forgets” to set his clock and consequently misses Uncle Beverly’s funeral. It’s what we all want to do, isn’t it, be really late for a dinner with the family that hates us? Little Charles is described as not complicated, just unemployed — a comment most playwrights have heard from their families at one time or another. So as a writer, I can’t help but think that Tracy Letts looked out over his family and just decided to whack the lot of them with the frying pan, something I trust he didn’t do in life. I don’t know this, of course. But I know the play is set very close to his home. Most of us writers are the outsiders in our families, the kids who had to get away in order to write about the nutjobs who screwed us up. That said, I wish Little Charles were really in the play, instead of just showing up to be laughed at. I liked him. I even liked the stupid Florida guy, though all he got to do was be the worst version of himself. So while the women got all the stage time, I ended up more interested in the men, I don’t know why. In any case, it’s a good sign when you leave a play and you can think of five other scenes you wish you could see.

Finally, at least for this go-round, I like what this play represents: a life-long association of a writer with a group of actors and a theater. This is why Shakespeare wrote so much, he had a whole gang of actors waiting to do his work. Go down the list — the writers who wrote a lot of wonderful plays were always associated with a community of actors they could write for: Shepard, Chekhov, Brian Friel, Alan Ackbourne, David Mamet, Lanford Wilson, Caryl Churchill, Richard Foreman, Wendy Wasserstein. Playwrights who live apart from theaters and actors have a lot of trouble getting their work done. Playwrights need to be around actors, need to be a part of a theater’s life.
It is worth noting that Mr. Letts began his theatrical life as an actor. Plays by actors tend to have lots of crazy stuff in them, and whatever else they’re about, they’re always about how much fun it is to be on the stage. “True West” springs to mind here. But this sense of fun is something writers with no acting talent can catch. And it’s definitely something the audience likes. We could use more things happening in the theater, and fewer plays where people sit in chairs and talk.

If we wanted to do one single thing to improve the theatrical climate in America, we’d assign one playwright to every theater that has a resident acting company. People wonder why so much great work came out of Actors Theatre of Louisville in the early days. I was there, so I know it was simply that you had everything you needed: actors who wanted to work, empty stages ready for plays and an artistic director who gave everybody a chance to do whatever they wanted as soon as they could think of it. Playwriting in America has suffered a devastating blow from the development process that keeps writers separate from the rest of the company, working on the same play for years. What playwrights want is what Steppenwolf has given Mr. Letts: a way to get a new play done, see what works, and then go on to the next one. “August: Osage County” is way more than a wonderful play. It is how we get back to having American plays on Broadway. We get them written for actors who want to do them, then producers get on board and start selling tickets. 

-- Marsha Norman, “Playwrights and the Theater,” New York Times