Artistic Associate Kittson O'Neill's Reflections on the MFA Playwright's Workshop
Last
week I got to take a little vacation to Theater Land. Theater Land is a magical
place where you don’t worry about taking out the trash, getting your kid to
school or rushing to a last minute audition. It’s a place where you think only
about the play you are working on. Where your brain can be in the rehearsal
room and NO WHERE else all day. Where you go for beers after rehearsal and talk
about all the other plays you love and then go back to your hotel to dream
about them all jumbled together. It’s a lovely place. This time Theater Land
was the Kennedy Center, where I was taking part in the MFA Playwrights Workshop. The Workshop is a weeklong exploration of six plays by current MFA playwrighting students and is also sponsored by the National New Play Network
& Stanford
University's National Center for New Plays.
InterAct is a proud founding member of the NNPN so I always jump at a chance to
work with them. In addition to the MFA
plays, an alumnus of the workshop is also invited to attend. This year it was
Jennifer Fawcett and I was asked to dramaturg her play.
Now you might be wondering, “What the heck is a dramaturg?”
When I first read this title in a program I certainly wondered. I decided they
were probably some sort of gnomish editor who showered the playwright with date
corrections and grammar adjustments. Well, that might be some dramaturgs at
some theaters, but at InterAct my job as the ‘turg is to help the playwright
make the play as powerful as possible, to bring it closer to their vision and to
always make sure that vision is going to come across to the audience. If you watched any of the Olympics lately,
you can think of me as that stoic coach on the sidelines watching every back
handspring with my heart in my mouth. It’s not my body on the line and I won’t
win a gold medal, but when a new play soars, sings and sticks its landing it's bliss for the dramaturg too.
At
InterAct my work as a dramaturg is often done on the fly. In addition to
working on the play in rehearsal, I’m reading submissions, making lobby
displays and arguing with Seth about why Richard 2 really does fit our mission.
I’m also a full time actor subject to all the vagaries and challenges of that
mad profession. Oh, and I have a kid. He’s four and a certain amount of every
day must be dedicated to pretending to be a Transformer.
When I met with Jennifer in
DC she had 70 pages of a play set in the 17th Century and three
scenes from a play set now. She knew her story about the demise of midwife at
the hands of an ambitious doctor had modern resonance, but she couldn’t make
the two stories work together. So, very bravely, she decided to set her modern
tale aside and focus solely on the epic world of London in 1606.
This
meant an enormous amount of research for me and my assistant:
Where did Doctors get cadavers for dissection? What did midwives call the placenta? How do you address an Archdeacon in 1606? It also meant that each day
was a vigorous and exciting conversation about science and mystery, about the
paranoia of King James 2, about fear and how people use it. Never before have I
been invited to be this deeply involved in the formation of a play; to see the
writer change the course of her plot, flip our sympathy with a character and
then change it all again the next day was thrilling.
It was a productive and exhausting week in Theater Land. I left the Kennedy Center with
dozens of questions still buzzing in my head. Jennifer left with 25 new pages
and, probably, even more questions. I was proud of her, proud of the progress
we made and now, like that nervous coach, I just have to see what she does out
there on the parallel bars. I’m sure she’ll stick her landing.
