Fifty Playwrights on their Craft PDF
Preview Fifty Playwrights on their Craft
FIFTY PLAYWRIGHTS ON THEIR CRAFT i ii FIFTY PLAYWRIGHTS ON THEIR CRAFT CAROLINE JESTER AND CARIDAD SVICH Edited by Caroline Jester Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY iii Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 5 0 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York W C 1B 3D P N Y 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Caroline Jester and Caridad Svich, 2018 Caroline Jester and Caridad Svich have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : 978-1-4742-5088-7 PB : 978-1-4742-3902-8 e PDF : 978-1-4742-3903-5 eBook: 978-1-4742-3904-2 Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To fi nd out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com . Here you will fi nd extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters . iv CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction viii Caroline Jester A Playwright’s Introduction xi Edward Bond 1 Where Do Ideas Come From and How Do They Begin Their Transformation into Plays? 1 Playwrights: José Rivera, Steve Waters, Charlene James, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alecky Blythe, Steven Sapp, Chris Goode, Sylvan Oswald, Naylah Ahmed, and Paula Vogel. 2 How Do You Put it All Together? 57 Playwrights: Chris Thorpe, Mia Chung, Kaite O’Reilly, Alexander Zeldin, Naomi Iizuka, Sibyl Kempson, Carl Miller, George Brant, Lisa D’Amour, and David Greig. 3 Don’t Put Me in a Box 113 Playwrights: Philip Ridley, Jordan Tannahill, Sabrina Mahfouz, Daniel Alexander Jones, Caridad Svich, Tim Etchells, Willy Russell, J. T. Rogers, Lin Coghlan, and Robert Schenkkan. v vi CONTENTS 4 I Can Pass Through Any Border 173 Playwrights: Chantal Bilodeau, Anders Lustgarten, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, David Hare, Katori Hall, Simon Stephens, Lucy Prebble, Anne Washburn, Tim Crouch, and Aizzah Fatima. 5 What Are You Responsible For? 233 Playwrights: Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, David Henry Hwang, David Edgar, Saviana Stanescu, Tena Štivic ˇ i c´ , Janice Connolly, Neil LaBute, Erik Ehn, and Christopher Shinn. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank all of the playwrights who have been so generous with their time and wisdom in order to make this book possible. We are also grateful to Anna Brewer for her vision to connect both sides of the Atlantic and everyone at Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Caridad would like to thank Zac Kline and R. Alex Davis for their invaluable work recording and transcribing some of the interviews, and Rachel Dart who has been super with everything; her special thanks go to Christopher Shinn. Caroline would like to thank Micheline Steinberg for continued support. vii INTRODUCTION Caroline Jester What do you get when you put twenty-fi ve British and twenty-fi ve American playwrights together? Or should that be twenty-fi ve American and twenty-fi ve British playwrights? Not everyone calls themselves a playwright so how can we collect all of these people together in just one book? Shouldn’t the theater makers be somewhere else? And how has a poet found her way in here? I think I’ve just spotted a painter as well, and even some who call themselves “artists who write for live performance.” And don’t forget the musicians and the screenwriters. That one has moved into the gaming industry; she clearly needs to be removed. You can’t be called a “playwright” if you enter the digital world. But the aim of this book isn’t to create chaos and confusion. What all of these “playwrights” have in common is that they write “plays” and need a live audience to experience them. Caridad Svich and I interviewed fi fty playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic over the course of one year that has seen what could be described as a paradigm shift. The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union and the man nobody thought would become the Republican Party’s Presidential Candidate is now the President of the United States. Each day brings more talk of division, whether that is debate around how to come out of a single market or building walls around countries. What we hope is that this book will celebrate the diversity that exists in both countries within the craft of playwriting. “Craft” in this book means the skill and understanding the playwrights have in turning their ideas into plays. There are many divisions within the theater industry and labels that are put on plays and artists that create them. We want to move away from this and put playwrights together who wouldn’t usually be found next to each other in one collection. viii INTRODUCTION ix If theater, as described in this book, has one foot in the past and one in the present with an eye on the future, then an intergenerational dialogue between playwrights could unpick some of the divisions and labels that are created. Given that theater is a dialectical form, don’t we need to listen to all perspectives? If this is what playwrights do in their plays, can’t we learn from the artform and apply this to the wider conversations around the industry? All fi fty playwrights were asked three core questions: 1 What is a playwright? 2 Does the audience infl uence your work? 3 How do playwriting and the playwright fi t into the digital age of storytelling? What you won’t discover is a defi nitive answer to any of these questions but “fool” might be one of my favourite answers to question 1. And “the audience” isn’t a homogenous group of people either. The relationship each playwright has with their audience differs as greatly as the people who share the fi nished play. But it is one of the most important relationships because the playwright needs the audience, even if they don’t always think about them when they are writing. Can the playwright and their work continue to fi nd a relevance in an age of digital media? It could be argued that, given the events noted above, there has never been a greater need in our very recent history to come together and explore multiple points of view. Finding a way to structure this book has been diffi cult. The very act of structuring could be seen as trying to label and categorize the playwrights. Most of the playwrights in this book could easily cross over into other chapters but we had to fi nd a way to focus the conversations. Going back to the craft of playwriting became our starting point and each chapter has a central question. Chapter 1 tries to fi nd out if the ideas that eventually become the plays start from the same place. How does a playwright know which thought, image, or feeling to follow? Chapter 2 is concerned with how those ideas are structured to become the play, and the extent to which where these are staged infl uences how they are told. Chapter 3 attempts to gain an insight into the playwright who crosses into other artforms. Do such shifts help or hinder the craft of playwriting, and why is there an
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