by Gordon Dahlquist
Playwright, Tea Party
My play Tea Party
is a pretty straight-forward story of insurrection, civil unrest, sectarian
violence, divided government, and foreign interference – which just happens to
be set in Colorado. I like plays that
ask questions more than plays that provide answers (I guess I feel that if
you’re that confident about answers, you ought to be doing something other than
writing a play), and so the work I’ll be doing is aimed at making the questions
in the play seem grounded and necessary, and as inevitable as possible.
The thing about writing for the theatre – which I think
playwrights both cherish and resent – is that it is a social art form. As precise and complete as a playwright can
make a play, the thing doesn’t find its final form without the intervention of
others – actors, designers, directors, musicians, the list can stretch on. Some playwrights love this (and indeed, since
most playwrights, like most writers, are essentially introverts, it’s
definitely nice to have an excuse to work with other people, especially on
something as interesting as one’s own play).
Personally, as much as I might prefer to define my work as tightly as a
painter or a novelist, I know those are different forms with different rules. The truth is, I can write and revise (and
revise, and revise) a play to the point where it’s literally impossible to
imagine changing a single word … and yet – and this never stops being humbling
– all it takes for that assurance to disappear is to hear the play aloud with
the merest, nominal audience – even two people is enough. Suddenly, once you’re hearing the words
through someone else’s ears, everything feels different. Flaws appear, alternatives suggest themselves,
a locked-down world is cracked open and another round of work, always
necessary, is possible.
The great thing about a festival like BAPF is how this
natural process is both adrenalized and intensely supported. In under three weeks a play goes through half
a dozen of these crack-it-open experiences: a retreat where I’m reading the
play aloud to the other creative teams (excruciating precisely because it will lay
the play bare); a first reading with actors where new voices will begin to
impose themselves onto the voices I’ve carried – taking them absolutely for
granted – in my own head for months; actual rehearsal, where each moment of the
play is examined by everyone involved – a conversation to which it’s my job to listen; a first staged reading with an
audience (where even in the best of circumstances we’ll be surprised – and
gratified – to see what else we need to do); more rehearsal, by which time
we’ll all be old pros (even if what we’re ‘pro’ at is wrestling with the
impossible task of making an unstaged play seem real); and at last the final reading,
which will crack everything open one last time and set me the task of going on. Each of these steps offers insights that are
utterly unavailable to a playwright working alone, and each step offers different
insights from the one before – because the whole creative team is learning more
about what they’re doing as they go. The
value to a playwright – to the play – is really incalculable.
For Tea Party,
despite the political questions the play raises, the reaction I’m hoping to get
from the audience is more than anything a continuation of that same
conversation I’ve had with the actors, the director, the dramaturg, the
designers. We don’t always have to
agree, but it seems like a good idea to keep talking.
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