In which I rant about the frustrations of playwriting…
Today I received the compiled responses to my workshopped script “Tales of Sex and Horror from the Bible,” and there was the usual mix of positive and negative comments (along with a really obtuse reaction from a Jerome Fellow *genuflects* who somehow missed most of the basic elements of the script’s premise). As usual, I bristle at the negative responses, especially the ones that sound like people were just not paying attention - though if they weren’t paying attention, one must ask why they weren’t more absorbed by the story. It really is my responsibility to make things clear and interesting.
I’m not a person who pretends not to care what the critics say - I care very much. I don’t do theatre to keep myself busy - I’m communicating through art and I want to know how that communication is received. It’s a two-way dialogue (three-way if you count God, which I do).
What is discouraging right now is not the negative comments - I know this particular piece is rough and needs work - or needs to be circular-filed. What is becoming evident, though is that there are very few people who care about what I care about. I write a lot of stuff associated with the Bible, but from a very heretical and deconstructionist (or revisionist) point of view. Christians are generally pretty uncomfortable with having Biblical text messed with, and often consider it too sacred to just throw out the boundaries and riff. And non-Christians on the whole just don’t care that much about Biblical subjects. There are very few of us in the middle gray area who are fascinated by the Bible and willing to poke and dissect and twist about to extract new meaning, uncovered truth, clarity from multiple points of view and most importantly, some kind of visceral relevance.
Though it’s really out there, “Tales of Sex and Horror…” even more so than “Goddess and the Magdalene” is the very essence of what I care to write about. And the biggest problem with the piece has always been that there really isn’t an audience for it (other than me). As I look back at what scripts of mine have been the most successful, their success seems to be inversely proportional to how passionate I am about the subject matter. Tales and Goddess - the two shows that are the most intensely personal, and to me the most important, are the two shows that seemed to have the most people scratching their heads.
Conversely, The Expanding Sky and Ice Maidens have had the strongest audience response. Both were commissions about subjects I never would have thought to tackle on my own, but since I got paid to write them, I wrote what I thought the audience wanted. This is not to say I didn’t care or think both stories were important, they’re just not the type of thing I would normally think to write about - a historical scientific biography and a contemporary family drama. In each case I managed to squeeze something spiritual into the story, but I had to really hold back, and/or constantly edit my spiritual diatribes and metaphors out of the script. I’ve been called didactic in every round of feedback I’ve gotten on nearly every script I’ve done. I guess I have to acknowledge that I really need to fight that.
For the record, The Friar & The Nurse was also a well-received script and it does have a lot of spiritual content (though it’s also been called didactic). However, one could consider my most successful script “Best Little Crackhouse in Philly” as it had two runs in New York and won awards both times. And it has nothing spiritually relevant in it whatsoever. In fact, it’s almost completely devoid of meaning, and is just intended to be entertaining.
So, I guess the question is, do I want to keep writing about what I care about and produce shows that probably won’t find an audience? Do I switch to writing just entertainment that is calculated to sell better? Or do I just stop writing for a while and focus on acting, design and music? There’s plenty of that to keep me busy. Or am I just venting because I got a bunch of negative feedback on a script?
It’s probably the last one. Given some of my recent online debates, it’s clear that the next script I need to write is one I set aside years ago - “John the the Baptist and Solome: Heads or Tail!”
Seriously. Maybe a different title, but yeah. Me and John have unfinished business.
***