PLAYWRITING

Can you recall some of the exercises you used in your workshops?

Some I borrowed from Murray Mednick or Maria Irene Fornés at Padua , and Martin Epstein, too. But many are my own. I love to work with found text. I often suggest finding some occupational quarterlies or magazines—there used to be a great one called Casket and Sunnyside for the mortuary industry. Real-estate brochures, magazines about guns and ammo, dog breeding, beekeeping, industrial shoe manufacturing. The reason is that these works all contain a very specialized vocabulary. There is a poetry to the specificity of these rarefied areas of expertise. I suggest finding one and fashioning a scene or one-act out of it. You are allowed only 10 percent of your own words. The rest has to be from this brochure on Chinese Herbal Remedies. It’s amazing how suddenly that sound of “I-am-writing-a-play” goes away.

The second exercise is linked to space. To go write the scene sitting in a tree. Or buried up to your chest in beach sand, or stretched out under the house by the light of a flashlight. Fornés used to love different versions of this. It’s really about listening to your body, in a sense. That a certain discomfort will push the brain to say something—and usually not directly. Which is the point.

The third is to write a short one-act, all interiors, in which you must know the weather without anyone ever mentioning it (or entering shaking off their umbrella).

Another exercise—and I use this all the time—is to have a student read a scene. Then once everyone in the class makes their comments, I ask the author to draw a red line through every other sentence. Then we re-read it. It’s always better, 100 percent of the time. It’s striking just how much better. Suddenly the actor has space—he or she can react, can listen. And it’s amazing how coherent the scene remains. Why? Well, as you well know, because the actor is there filling it in. That’s what good actors do.

But I think really, among my favorites, is to insist that the main character be offstage, though it is allowed to hear his or her voice. This is all about getting out of your head. Every time I do one of these exercises, I try to emphasize that the writer must let go, stop owning it all. Stop owning any of it. Found text and specialized occupational vocabularies also sensitize one to the “sound” of words, of grammar. Often a fatal problem for young writers is that everyone sounds the same. And that’s exactly like the author.     

    
-- John Steppling, interviewed by Jon Robin Baitz in American Theatre


                      Gary Cole, Betty Gilpin, Jenny Bacon, Lois Smith, and Julianne Nicholson in Sam Shepard’s Heartless