Asking for 10-page samples

Having had to negotiate reading 50+ submissions at a time (on more than a few occasions), I favor asking for 10-page samples. This is not a wholly favorable practice; it frequently provokes pointed questions about the legitimacy of vetting scripts.

And of course I have had ethical issues with this. Does my asking for an abbreviated version of your play cheat us both by not having the full product at hand to judge in its entirety?

Maybe.

But, as one who has 50+ full-length plays to wade through, and as someone with little to no assistance in reading the aforementioned 50+ plays, does it make my jobs as literary manager and producer easier?

Definitely.

I've weighed the pros and cons of abbreviated samples, with fairness as the primary criterion:

By asking for the first 10 pages, I get the beginning of your play, and thus I should know two things:

• The specific importance of your inciting moment, what I call the Passover Factor: What is making this day/moment in time special? Why does this play need to exist? And;

• Is what is happening indeed interesting enough to get me through 10 pages of dramatic action?

Play readers need to judge as best we can what our audiences might think were this text inflicted upon them. It's not enough for me, the initial arbiter, to like it, although that's a definite plus because I will favor its further consideration for production. And to assume that my judgment is of a critical and professional proficiency to instantly and infallibly detect all Scripts of Unusual Caliber is self-righteous poppycock. But if I have the first 10 pages I can make a fair assumption about (again) two things:

• The efficacy of the opening of the play, and;

• The remainder of the work, which I can reasonably expect to be equally compelling. If your first 10 pages kick my ass, I'll gladly ask you for and read through the rest, waiting for the grand payoff. If your first 10 pages don't grab me, then I can safely deduce that the rest will similarly glaze my eyes over.

Remember, I have 50+ plays to read and judge to the best of my ability. And “to the best of my ability” means just that. Few folks admit to play-reading fatigue. One person can read only so many plays before they get tired and lose the energy needed to fairly critique each successive play. If I have to read 50+ complete plays, all ranging from 45 to 95 pages, I'm going to lose my shit.

But if I have to read only 10 pages, I can not only process the bulk faster, leaving me more time to coach my actors, design the posters, sell tickets, and clean the theatre's toilets, but convince myself that I am judging fairly every play on my desk. The job is easier, and my time is better spent.

And as I read those ten pages, I have to imagine the audience experiencing those 10 minutes of performed script. That’s a long time to wait before the play shows its power.

Before we go any further, let me state for the record that, as an eternally hopeful scribbler of dramatic material, I want everyone to read my entire play through. Why? Because they are damn good, and I want literary managers to have the whole things to judge. (Yes, I see the contradiction here.)

Theatres, in order to achieve their noble goals of Producing Killer Art For The Masses, spend an inordinate amount of their time asking for money so they can stay open, have electricity, pay their taxes and rents, maintain heating and cooling systems, pay directors and (we hope) the actors, and keep the artistic director brimmed with skinny double soy lattes and Ramen noodles. All these items are highest on the “Necessities We Absolutely, Positively Need to Pay For” list 

What's far down said list is “People to Read All These Damn Submissions.” That is, people who know how to read plays. People with experience who know how to read plays. We've all seen the opp line: “Give us six months to a year to get back to you.” It could be they have only one or two people to read every play submitted. It could mean they really want to dedicate time to making sure they find the best work. Most of the time, I think, it means both.

And as long as I'm ranting, let me briefly discuss opps that ask for a second option: “Send us your best 10 pages,” or more commonly, “a 10-page representative selection of your play.”

Why is this different from asking for the first 10 pages? Simply because reading the first 10 pages takes us chronologically into your magnum opus, the same as the thousands of future sold-out audiences will experience. That's important. But if the playwright cherry-picks an arbitrary section of the work, the reader cannot reasonably extrapolate the assets and liabilities of the whole work. We're getting what the playwright feels is the best part of the play. I don't want that. If this is the best 10 pages, then I have to think the rest of the play is less compelling.

So why not just ask for the whole play and stop reading after 10 pages? Seems like the perfect answer, no? I remember someone telling me to “just get through the first one hundred pages” of this particular novel, and then “It will all pay off.” Granted, the second hundred pages were thrilling, but if I had not been urged to stick with it, I would have set the book down for lack of interest. Likewise, theatres can't have someone push you back into your seat through the first act waiting for act two to spark joy or other emotion. We all want your work to be fantastic, and sometimes we carry on reading counting on that glimmer of hope you showed in the first 10 pages, waiting for the worthy payoff that many times, sadly, does not come. For us, that's precious time spent. 

In this society which undervalues, or in some cases, negatively values the need for art to flourish and creativity to stir up the coagulated Zeigeist Soup, theatres have one overarching job: survival. The need to do whatever they can to pay the rent and the staff, keep the grid functioning, and find 30-foot hamster wheels for their ex-lover's surrogate father's updated version of Hamlet, now set in a steampunk Habit-Trail. They need plays that are sure winners. And they need to make sure they accrue those sure winners as efficiently and as fairly as they can. It behooves every dramatic writer to make those 10 pages count.

Trigger Warnings

A colleague recently posted a New York Times article about trigger warnings with the comment “Nothing ruins a magic trick more than telling the audience you are about to perform one.”

Trigger warnings have become more prevalent in theatre in the past few years, and for good reason. Americans have become more sensitized to personal, physical, and social issues, in respect to both their own anticipated reactions to certain stimuli and to whatever adverse reactions their audience mates might experience.

Fifteen years ago I self-produced one of my plays. A woman I had known for several years asked me if there were instances of gunfire in the work. It was at that point I remembered that she had experienced the tragedy of a family member committing suicide. Everyone in the family had heard the fatal shot. I assured her that the show was free of such effects, and learned something new: that my work could have more of an impact than I'd realized, and a negative one at that.

I'm fairly conservative when it comes to social mollycoddling. I think that in many ways we've oversensitized ourselves to every minor speed bump in the Highway of Life, and that sometimes we take it too far. I also believe that theatre can be a master tool for public enlightenment; it often makes use of powerful revelatory material.

But I further recognize that the world we now live in has fewer places of safety. Gunshots are not what they used to mean to the privileged: abstract sound effects that had no meaningful relevance except to let the hero cowboy slaughter another sixteen “Indian savages.” But now there are shooters walking into schools, churches, malls, cinemas . . . everywhere, almost . . . without any preventive safeguards whatsoever. It's an almost everyday occurrence. Gunshots have been brought into the mainstream. If you have or care about a school-age child, you know what a gunshot may mean. Thousands of people have survived mass shootings and many more thousands have served in war zones as members of the vast U.S. military. That’s a whole lot of gunshot trauma.

Sexual abuse has also become commonplace. We see instances of it every day, from the White House to the Catholic Church to every daytime TV talk show. Real people, not just invented characters, have been through a certain kind of hell—and more and more of us are realizing that it's no longer something that happens to someone else. Precise facts and figures vary from source to source, but even if you’re looking at the most conservative estimate, the percentage of women who have experienced a personal/sexual violation is astrofuckingnomical.

And we see instances of sexual abuse all over the TV, every day. Rape is the great leveler, and TV writers seem to use it arbitrarily and all too frequently. Need a female character to have a life-changing horrific experience? Rape always works, because that is what many people think is the only substantial (read dramatic) adverse experience that an audience will react to. Rape is cheap in entertainment.

As character craftspersons we always think in terms of the pushes and pulls, the whys and hows, the stimuli and effects upon our characters. In comparison we have rarely thought of what we might do to our audiences.

I favor trigger warnings. Life in modern USA is much too violent to begin with, from our blockbuster movies with denouements featuring ultra-cataclysmic CGI to our jingoistic fascination with settling things with macho violence. We exploit physical and sexual abuse for emotional effects and money. I think it's right to warn rape victims that the show they are about to see contains a scene of sexual violence. I think it's necessary to let the mother of a shooting victim know the play will contain gunshots. I think it's important to warn epilepsy and migraine sufferers that the show will have a strobe light effect. I also think it is a courtesy to people across the spectrum that the play will or may contain strong and possibly offensive language. Some of our friends, neighbors, and relatives may live a hard enough life just being who they are without being surprised at a $47/seat show.

Obstacles. Those bits in the middle.

We've all had issues with obstacles--those pesky road blocks that all protagonists have to navigate successfully in order to achieve their goals. Every play needs 'em. But some playwrights have trouble finding them.

I almost always know the beginnings and endings of my plays. Can't start unless I do. I usually also know of some first-act cliffhanger or Momentously Dramatic Moment I need to have happen.

Some folks road map their projects, using index cards or spreadsheets. I think I envy that technique, but I also wonder if by the time I've drawn out the entire plot I may have lost the urge to write it. I say this because I tried it. I spent more time trying to arrange the cards so I could see them all at once, but half of them fell off the wall and behind my desk and they are still back there, presumably talking amongst themselves and the dust bunnies. 

I tried again with the string-path thing, sticking things on the wall and running strings between relevant items. Although that was a complete disaster (it made me dizzy), I did end up with a ten-minute play set in a spider web and about a dozen new political conspiracy theories so it wasn't a complete loss.

In any event, how do we negotiate the ascent up the shark fin (see diagram)? What gauntlets do we design for our protagonists to bravely fight through? What are the individual obstacles? How do we playwrights find them?

I usually take a look at the world of the play itself and see what difficulties it may provide organically.

Assuming I have my basic characters and a general idea of the world of the play, I start to think about some of the following things. Let's start with the basics:

- What does the protagonist want?
- Why does he/she want it?
- Is the protagonist good, evil, or complex?
- Why does the antagonist try to foil the protagonist's efforts?
- Is the antagonist good, evil, or complex?
- Where are the ethical limits/moral boundaries for both protagonist and antagonist?
- What actions do I initially envision the protagonist taking? What would be the results of those?
- What would be the next logical step?
- What would be the next illogical step?
- What dramatic moments do I imagine taking place within the play?
- What are the breaking points for the protagonist/antagonist?
- What are the protagonist's flaws and how does he/she work against him/herself?

Next, let's look at the world of the play in all of its aspects.
Is the world “real” as we know it, hard-wired and limited by our current reality, or is set within magical realism? If not real, what rules apply that don't in the real world (because even in magical realism there have to be rules) and how do these exceptions affect the characters? What limitations or freedoms does that world impose or allow?

Politics: What are the political aspects and boundaries? Are the characters discriminated against? Do they discriminate? Are they endowed with political power or under political restraint? What are their views? Are they active or passive? What form does the government take? Democratic? Authoritarian? Absent?

Sexual/gender: What natural empowerments or liabilities do the sexual/gender aspects of each character impose? What views of life? What past experiences? What possibilities for the future? What ways of creating joy in a relationship? What ways of destroying a reputation? Are they out or closeted? Are they bigoted or welcoming? Is it against the law to be anything but straight...or gay?

Geographical: How does the physical world of the play affect the characters' actions? Is it oppressively hot or freezingly cold? Is it dangerous? Is it unremarkable? Is it lush? Destroyed? Post-apocalyptic or Garden of Eden? In what settings does the world of the play take place: a bar, bowling alley, a castle, a resort, a tenement, a living room, a detention center? What aspects of your setting can be used to challenge a character?

Physical/Medical: Look at the physical traits of your characters and see how they relate to the world around them? What aspects make it easier/more difficult for them to interact? Are they too good looking? Shunned for disabilities? Comely/plain? Sick? Contagious? Can they speak/hear/see?

Other things to think about:

- Time/date/era of the work
- Technological: age of the plow/industrial revolution/computerization/cybernetics?
- Psychological: are there any neuroses/phobias/past events that may inhibit action?

And: Is the protagonist's goal actually reachable? Or are they doomed to failure?

I examine all the elements of the world my characters inhabit and I look to see how they can either aid or work against them. Every particular in the world of your play may serve as an organic problem or a tool used by another character to trouble your protagonist.

Just Mull. And Enjoy It.

It's called Writer's Block, that agonizing period fraught with insecurity when the creative river dries up. Writer's Block: when you need the words to come trotting out like frisky thoroughbreds, but they remain stubbornly mulish, refusing to leave the barn. (A barn you can't enter, by the way, not even to get a glimpse of them in their stalls, effectively stalling your work.)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that we've all had this experience. We're told it's not fun. It's distressing. Oh my, how good would it be if the lines just paraded out proudly as they should, in a constant cavalcade, all dressed up and looking spiffy.

It does happen. I have several 10-minute pieces and a few 2-minute monologues that just flooshed out of the vomitorium smack onto the page. Such a glorious rush. However, my pride rests on my glacially expanding canon of full-lengths (that subject, the merits of short plays vs longer ones, in another blog, farther upstream. Probably followed by “The Supreme Annoyance of 'Multiple Metaphor Pileup' in Essay Writing”).

Anyway, I digress. The creative standstill does happen. Perhaps more often than we'd like. But I take serious issue with the moniker “Writer's Block.” It’s negative. It plants the idea in every writer’s head that Something Is Wrong!—something bad that screams out to be fixed.

The term “Writer's Block” is, as Gandhi used to say, B.S. This lull in our usual flow of typing is not something to worry about. Maybe we're just tired. Maybe we had too much to eat last night. Maybe too much on our minds.

Relax, it's okay.

In my normal writing process there are periods where I sit and think about my current scribbling, sometimes for hours or days at a time. Weeks, even. It's part of the way I write. My mind goes off into the ether and I'm beyond reach. I don’t even experience concrete thoughts or specific ideas. I feel like a whale shark, mouth agape, gently trolling for krill. I’m lucky to have friends and family who recognize the thousand-yard stare and take turns feeding and dressing me. I'm betting there are a few of you out there who experience similar episodes.

I accept this as a natural part of creativity. I expect it. I enjoy it. I consider it work, as equal a part of the writing process as the frenetic mistyping that thunders out when The Big Reveal finally hits. It's like great sex: a slow, thoughtful beginning, a journey of sensual exploration and discovery that gradually builds up to a fevered climax of gushing words. And this happens several times in every full-length creation.

Let’s call this languid synaptic search Mulling. Mulling is an activity where the imagination goes in search of those magic moments that not just advance the text, but glorify it. Mulls, like whale sharks, troll for those creative krill, Epiphanies. In that massive sea of ether, each Mull needs to find its appropriate Epiphany. Because there is only one Epiphany for each of the writer’s different Mulls.

There will be false alarms along the way, connections that look exciting, promising, and juicy, yet turn out to be disappointing when the resulting sploosh of typing at last breathily subsides and the Epiphany looks around at your apartment and talks about redecorating. Alas, we must change our phone number once again and begin searching anew.

But I never worry. Ever. Because in my experience, nearly every questing Mull has found its mate. It's a zen-like journey—and it's always been worth it. I sit back, relax, and go Mulling merrily along, roaming the ether for that special Epiphany. It's a lovely landscape, and I always find equal amounts of joy in the peregrination and in the anticipation of consummation.

And frequently I find things I never imagined.  Because Mullination by nature largely involves aimless wandering, it sometimes runs into ideas, phrases and words that take me to areas I hadn't previously considered. Each one expands my landscape of possibility, and almost always the work in question benefits tremendously.

I say screw The Block. Deny the disquietude, forswear the fantods, and Get Your Mull On. Big time.

Best Advice I Ever Received About Playwriting: Learn How to Do Everything

Seems like a simple concept, and yet many playwrights continue to keep themselves away from the rest of the profession. I've heard them say things like “The more time I spend learning X, the less time I have for writing,” or “I'm not a set designer/director/actor, I'm a playwright. I need to concentrate on my writing,” or “I really can't afford the time.”

I do realize that we are squeezed for time; many of us work two jobs, have families, and whatever time we have for writing is precious. I'm semiretired and have more time than I’ve ever had to spill words all over a page. But when I worked full time I forced myself to get up earlier, trek to the coffee shop, invigorate my blood with fresh ground Costa Rican, and pretend I was on the fast track to a Tony.

We do what we can do in this profession. To take a note from the revered actor, William Shatner, I encourage playwrights everywhere to seek out new life and new civilizations within the trade. To boldly go into every part of the theatre, and learn about what happens after you set down the words that the rest of the profession hangs on.

Because, yes, without those words, there'd be little to do. But in my experience, writing in a vacuum has serious inherent liability. You’ve heard the chestnut warnings: never require the use of a whirling helicopter in a community theatre version of The Entire Vietnam War in Four and-a-Half Minutes. Never insist on 30 tuxedos and an orchestra for the closing number of your ten-minute play, My Cat Has a Cyst.

By spending time learning the crafts and working as a director, dramaturg, stage manager, artistic director, literary manager, and designer of sets, lighting, costumes, and sound, I’ve learned these playwriting lessons—the hard way. Extrapolate as needed:

• Expecting an actor to learn perfect Russian pronunciation to deliver the line “Umyay kahpusty bolshiah kahrona” (“My broccoli has a big head”) may not work out as you expect;
• Medieval dresses that hang to the ground (they ALL did) will cause your actor to go face first into the scenery if you require her to cross the stage at a run;
• Never give a legally-blind person a real sword;
• Attempting to punctuate a scene where two actors are debating work ethics while playing a game of racquetball with ball-bouncing sound effects will (a) create 30 sound cues, (b) cause the actors to lose their places at least once, (c) make the stage manager call down Biblical plagues on your head, and, most importantly, (d) annoy the hell out of the audience with repeated “thwop-ke-whops”;
• And speaking of stage managers, NEVER, EVER give them a task they have to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to accomplish to make your vision happen. They are your allies, your best friends, and the lifeline to a successful production. I'd rather have multiple root canals than a pissed-off SM;
• A reference to a recent historical event that has nothing to do with the setting, time, or theme of the play destroys the linear flow of a play;
• Asking for repeated “specials,” lighting cues that require rewiring, cue creations, and time spent in the flies may be technical overkill for a small, budget-bereft production;
• Asking for a set with the technical complexity of The Price or American Buffalo (both heavily laden with stage crap) may take your play out of production consideration. Theatre companies are (almost) all destitute. Asking for things above the average third-grader's school lunch budget may well get you a “Thanks, but we had 12 million submissions” email. My own preference, learned by trial and lots of errors: You can do (almost) anything with a black-box stage and minimal set pieces. And it's way cheaper.

Everything you do in theatre other than plying your trade as a scribe will benefit your writing. You are not just writing to create a world, you are writing to make that world credible and as easy to produce as possible. You are not alone in this work, not one bit. When you take the time to work with others and learn from their expertise, they will teach you how to be a better and more successful (produced) playwright.