Writing for Someone Else
I will begin with a quote from a letter from Chekhov to Alexander Lazarev Gruzinsky, a young up and coming writer and playwright, who saw Chekhov as a mentor and tutor: "Dear Sir, you asked me to express my opinion on how to write a play. I must disappoint you. I do not know the answer to that."
I don't know the answer either, but I know the journey, the paths, and the bumps in the road. I'm not a drama teacher. I'm a word addict. A person who accompanies other people who have fallen to this drug.
I wrote my first play while I was in drama school. I was desperately in love with a classmate. I wanted her. The damn obstacle: she had a boyfriend. Torn apart by the agony of love, I sat down to write. I wrote a play at night. For her. I didn't know how to write. I started digging into plays. Did my own voice interest me? No. Did the structure of the play interest me? No. I had only one goal. To write a role for her so that she would fall in love with me. Into this play I poured all the words I couldn't say to her. But on stage? There, there's no one to stop me from telling her "I love you." In rehearsals, we enacted this scene over and over again. And miraculously, it worked. She broke up with her boyfriend and we became a couple for a considerable period of time. There, for the first time, I understood the power of words, but there was another lesson there that I hadn't yet wisened up to learn: I wrote a play for someone.
A small jump in time. One year later. I started working with at-risk youth. At the end of the year I had to write a play for them. After a year of working and getting to know them, I wanted to make their dream come true. I wanted them to play the roles they dreamed of. To let them play around in the private world they revealed to me. Not a play about their life story. But an internal exposure of childhood. Of a tremendous desire to live and dream. I delved into plays again. I stole sentences. I constructed dramatic moves. I tailored a play that would suit them exactly. The play earned praise, won awards, and even traveled to festivals abroad. Thanks to this play, I fulfilled their dreams, internal and external. Later, I wrote many more plays for them. It was my training gym. And again, the same lesson I had not yet understood was repeated: I wrote a play for other people.
Today I understand this better. Playwrights don't write for themselves, they write for other people. Shakespeare wrote so the theater wouldn't close, and so that the actors would be happy, he had to challenge Richard Burbage as the leading actor. Sophocles, who was a general, wrote for his soldiers. Tony Kushner wrote "Angels in America" for his friends.
Over the years, playwrights have written for actors and actresses, for directors and friends, and slowly, for the theater as well. Children's playwrights are moved by the gaze of the children in the audience, by conversations with them, their inner child comes to life. An audience is something that accumulates over the years, but young playwrights are in a hurry to write "for the theater." They want to satisfy their ego. To feel that their play has been put on stage, but a young playwright needs to find one person to write for. To turn the play into a gift, to give moments and words to someone else. It's enough to let someone close to you read the text without asking for criticism, and suddenly you have someone you want to move and make laugh. That's how you will discover your personal voice, because only you know how to give this gift. Technical tools can be learned. It's important to practice them. They will give you the freedom to create any gift you want. Imagine that you are planning a party or a wedding. It's a long evening. Full of exciting events, dancing, a ceremony. We all just want to feel. And it's much easier to stir emotion in someone else than it is in ourselves.
After a lot of trial and error, I learned this lesson. Every time I wrote for myself, I failed. It wasn't until I started writing for others that anything worked. Build a community for yourself. It can happen in a living room. It can happen in a writing workshop. If you don't have people like that around you, sign up for a workshop. It's much easier to take care of another person than it is to take care of yourself. And deadlines? It's just another form of commitment to them.
Organize a party, with music, with laughter and sharp sentences. Imagine the actors excited, write riddles for the directors, that only they would know how to solve, write dialogue like music. Writing a play is giving a gift. First to a close person. Then to the group. Then to the audience, and finally to humanity.
Comments