Where does a playwright’s responsibility to the audience’s emotional health begin and end?

We like to proclaim proudly that “the best plays are the ones that move the audience, challenge the intellect, and serve as a catalyst for productive conversation.” Writers frequently produce socially critical work on serious and controversial issues based on a Pandora’s Box of tragedies including rape and sexual assault, drug addiction, war, gun violence, child abuse, and acts of racial or gender violence.

And we tend to applaud these efforts because we are progressive thinkers. We care about others and believe that in placing such critical topics on a public stage we bring wider attention to the issue and “effect social change” for the better. We hope that these plays will generate compassion, even empathy, and in doing so, increase understanding between disparate individuals and groups. We see theatre as an important tool to hold a mirror to reality and make the world a more hospitable home for our fellow travelers.

Each of the topics mentioned above carries with it the pain of millions of shattered souls. And each of those souls is a living, breathing person who has experienced the most catastrophic of trauma. Sometimes, in our quest to provide boldness and truth, artists forget that.

What happens when playwrights actually cross the line between what’s artistically appropriate for their particular script and gratuitous use of an incident intended solely to add more “weight” to said script? How do playwrights determine if their words enhance the examination of a social issue or are simply emotional gut-punches designed to shock? Where does “appropriate” end and “gratuitous” begin?

Some writers seem to think that the more emotional triggers they load a play with, the more powerful it will be, and therefore the better they are doing their job. For them, dramatic heft outweighs compassion.

There are no hard and fast easy answers to this. I realize that each play is unique. But I have seen plays that, to my mind, are chock-full of trigger material, and the playwrights failed to respect the subsequent fallout or see the pain they caused, however inadvertently, to audience members.

Without doubt, theatre for social change is a critically important part of our arts culture, at its best heightening awareness, compassion, and respect for “others.” Bravely addressing the spectrum of social ills, theatre for social change can be a critical and essential civic barometer.

Still, it must be managed with care and respect.

I recently became involved in a discussion in which an audience member took issue with a particular line in a play. The line in question quite blatantly referenced a violent attack that had happened to a well-known and beloved fellow community (and regular audience) member. That person suffered from severe PTSD, and will have substantially painful memories for the rest of their life. It literally hit home. As became clear, the line was not essential to the arc or story of the play; it was an additive line (comedically written) meant to increase emotional impact. Discussion ensued; the theatre’s artistic director theatre stood behind the line and maintained that it righteously added to the play’s emotional impact. After the complainant alerted the playwright to the pain that was happening to the collective community because of this one throwaway line, the playwright (an established and much-produced writer) readily agreed to excise the line from that particular production in that particular community. But not from the standard text. Presumably, the line will remain in all future productions.

(In addition, the line was a blindside; the the play itself was about Topic X, and the line came out of nowhere about Topic Y, which had nothing to do with the theme of the work. Certainly those expecting a production about one issue may have been confused when an additional issue had been entered into the work.)

Social relevance in theatre is not measured by how much it disturbs an audience. Anyone can disturb an audience. Social relevance is measured by how much it causes audience members to rethink their world, to experience the realities of others.

If you choose to disturb me with your content, be it a play concept or even just a single line, you’d better include a followup that is a thorough and serious treatment of the issue. You need to demonstrate to me that you understand theatre’s inherent power to disturb and that you have taken the time to flesh out your subject with respect and maturity. If you choose to disturb me with your content—or reference a well-known public tragedy—solely as a fly-by mention, or a toss-off joke, or to add on to some other issue and then ignore the fact that you might have just really hurt someone, you’ve just gratuitously disrespected not just your audience but every soul who’s been injured by that content.

Every audience member is a real soul, and you have no way of knowing what those souls’ histories contain. You simply cannot be cavalier when it comes to potentially painful subjects, not when someone in the audience might feel that you are using their nightmares for cheap effect. And if, by way of explanation, you cast the blame on the audience for either interpreting as you intended or not, then you are behaving immaturely and irresponsibly. Audiences do not either “get it” or “not get it.”

As playwrights we are solely and entirely responsible for our text, the choice of triggers we employ, the message(s) we choose to transmit, and the method used to transmit those messages.

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.

Bad Decisions Make Great Drama.

It's a truth. Look at any great play and see what the bad decision was. Someone fucked up hugely. Someone got badly burned. Someone got irreparably damaged. Maybe someone got killed.

For various reasons, we tend to nurse on others' misfortune. I use “nurse” in its most beneficial definition. Not voyeurism, where we enjoy the vicariously tumultuous ride of a soap opera, but a lesson in which we witness a tragedy and its aftermath.

This is what art does. It holds a mirror up to life and shows what humans truly are, both at our most noble and heroic and our most despicable evil. That's its purpose. Good plays show us both at the same time.

But still. Bad decisions make great drama.

Like killing your brother then marrying his widow and stealing a throne. Like putting profit over safety and shipping faulty airplane engines to the war front. Like using driving lessons to sexually abuse your pre-teenage niece. Like seeking the imprisonment of a teacher who dares to teach science rather than religion. Like leaving your lover when he gets AIDS or denying the truth of yourself in the face of cultural superstition. Each of these is a tragedy. Each of these decisions destroyed people’s lives.

Somewhere in the theatre world there has been an argument about creating new art based on the current Ford/Kavanaugh hearings. I've seen arguments on several sides: why we should use this topic to create, why we shouldn't create something so unfair to men, why we shouldn't create anything new in favor of existing work on the subject, why only certain people should be allowed to create certain work because of who they are or shouldn’t be allowed to do so because of their ignorance of experience.

Someone, somewhere will create a work based on this. It's inevitable. I hope it's profound and sympathetic and above all, truthful. I hope it makes a statement so indelibly formidable that it cannot be ignored.

I hope it's written by someone with a compassionate soul.

And for those who see this as apology for scavenging a tragedy for personal gain, I offer the words of a  profound, sympathetic, truthful, and compassionate woman:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

—Toni Morrison

How much control is too much? How much control is not enough?

There's an ongoing discussion (started around Euripides' time, I think) about how far playwrights should go to protect the intent, the mode of expression, the overall tone, the biology of the being – the essential, unique identity that communicates the play's intent..

Unlike movies, where the final presentation is set in digital stone--static, unchangeable, and repeated exactly the same with every viewing--every individual production (indeed, every performance of every production) of The Play I Took Fifty Years to Write will undoubtedly be different. And while this allows flexibility and creative input from the artistic and technical collaborators involved, to uniquely flavor each performance, it also opens the door for individual professionals to alter and even destroy a play's original intention.

Some playwrights are famous for demanding strict adherence to their specific ideas of how a script should be cast, directed, and performed, insisting that every production remain as close to the playwright's personal vision as possible. And in all fairness, playwrights have that right. The play is theirs, and they can be as prescriptive as they like. The play is an entity that represents themselves as artists, and any egregious variations in such representation will mislead audiences as to what the playwright meant to offer the world.

And while some playwrights have made news by exercising strict control over their work, I believe that in most cases their “interference” is not about hyper-control. Yes, there have been productions where a particular piece was so altered through direction and/or actor choice that it becomes almost unrecognizable. It's happened to lots of us. A few years back one of my monologues was presented at a community theatre. What was originally intended as a tender, confessional moment became a threatening, macabre date gone wrong. How did this happen? Performance interpretation without playwright guidance.

It proved to be an invaluable lesson to me about how differently my words can be interpreted, and thus, how much more thoughtful I must be when I finalize those words within the context of the whole piece. Did the director and actor do the piece as I intended? Hell, no. They simply worked with the words they had been given and presented a reality that, while making perfect sense to them, I had never considered.

Was there any harm done? Nope, none at all. The world moved on with nary a ripple in the zeitgeist.

But this experience made me think about how widely my words could be interpreted. (And no, I am not referring to the myriad and innumerable productions of Hamlet Out West/in Space/in a Zoo/in a Brothel/with Zombies.) Without explicit playwright guidance to a certain character's proclivities, limitations, or critical actions, how many possible doors of interpretation might be opened with my use of, say, this particular word choice? Or this sentence? (Or this syllable, even?) What Pandora's Box might I inadvertently open if I employ the use of, say, slang? Every word choice should be a clue to a certain character. And, since in most cases the playwright is nowhere near the rehearsal room, it's possible for directors and players to stray from the playwright's intention.

As a director, actor, dramaturg, and sometime designer as well as a playwright, I have always strived to be as open as possible to interpretative variations. To me, theatre is a room with an always-open door where anyone with a desire and passion can enter and play. Theatre does not look at who you are, nor does it restrict; it is the ultimate playground for any and all to have the chance to exercise their visions and creativity.

And yet casting and directorial choices do affect the production. Change the chemistry, and you change the result. A recent play of mine included a married couple, one man, one woman. Why this choice? No reason other than I am a straight white male and my play did not call for the couple to be anything other than straight. Initially, I thought, making them anything but a straight couple would have been disingenuous. I felt that if I were going to include a gay couple, that particular choice should be relevant to the theme of the play.* In this production, the director found a perfect female actor to play opposite the female lead. The chemistry was so good between the two actors that he asked for permission to cast them as a lesbian couple. 

My entire concern was about the dynamics and tension between the couple, not their genders or sexual orientation. I agreed with the casting change. Ultimately this proved to be without a doubt the correct decision. The two particular actors embodied everything I could have wished for in their onstage relationship: love, truthfulness, strength, and dedication. It was clearly the best actor combination I could have wished for. And I was happy to be able to be a part of the discussion. But I was part of that decision, which is what's important here.

But what if I hadn't been? What if the production company was in West Noodle, AK, and I was on the Riviera drinking away my royalties for The Play I Took Fifty Years to Write? What responsibilities do I have, as a playwright, to ensure that my work is handled with proper creative judgment? I loathe the idea of flooding my work with caveats and prescriptive stage directions, attempting to force directors and actors to do it “this way and only this way.” I cherish freedom and variation, yet how can I as a playwright ensure that the original intent and purpose are maintained?

Guidelines. No director will be able to read your mind to determine your preferences. It's up to playwrights to include, either in the character descriptions or notes, whatever they think is of critical importance to keep the play on its best track. The inclusion of playwright's notes, perhaps such as “X remains calm until the last scene,” “Y exhibits no verbal hesitations whatsoever before page 32,” “Character B is an African American lesbian and should be played by an African American female,” can guide the production team toward performing the work as closely as possible to what the playwright intended.

Playwrights are not prescient. It's hard to envision the many interpretative choices a production will surface. This is why I wholeheartedly recommend a workshop process. With a good team of actors and a capable dramaturg/director, nearly every play will undergo a series of readings and examinations that will most likely bring out possible interpretive pitfalls.

Can one make a play actor- and director-proof? Probably not. But a playwright can take steps to reduce possible future instances of “What were they thinking?” It's part of the job to journey with the play beyond the initial creative phase and into the second part of the process: giving it over to new participants, and therefore new viewpoints. This is an excellent way for a playwright to learn about other possible pitfalls lying in wait within the script.

*Oddly enough, the choice to make the couple gay was welcomed by several same-sex couples who thanked me for (inadvertently) "normalizing" the characters' marital status.

Still Working This One out...

Nike guilty of sweatshop employment practices for years, paying ~20 cents a day to workers working 60-70 hours a week to produce high-end gear for privileged buyers. Most people don't give a shit and continue to buy Nike products.

According to the Guardian: Gino Fisanotti, Nike’s vice-president of brand, said: “We believe Colin is one of the most inspirational athletes of this generation, who has leveraged the power of sport to help move the world forward. We wanted to energise its meaning and introduce ‘Just Do It’ to a new generation of athletes.”

Possible translation: "Using this high-profile situation to capitalize."

(https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/sep/04/nike-controversial-colin-kaepernick-campaign-divisive)

Colin Kaepernick legally exercises his rights as a United States citizen to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, causing a storm of protest. It is a peaceful yet powerful gesture, and controversy explodes. Meanwhile, African-Americans are being murdered with unconscionable regularity in the streets—and on camera--by police with almost no justice for the victims ensuing or change in police oversight. Kaepernick is then “not hired” by any football teams. ANY teams. 

Then Kaepernick then becomes one of the faces of the new Nike ad campaign.

Here's the dilemma. Nike sucks. You can take their asinine swoosh and compost it. It's simply just gear. Clothing. Sneakers, t-shirts...inconsequential, high-priced crap. None of the products really matter. None of them are life-critical. None of them, if they were gone tomorrow, would matter. Oh, right, right...except to its shareholders, who ignore the sweatshop conditions under which this crap is made. Fuck Nike. 

But if Colin Kaepernick needs another venue to transmit his message, then I'm with him. If the slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” wants to use him and his issue to get their advertising across to a new generation of Americans, and Kaepernick (or Assange or Snowden or whoever else has given up everything because they believe in something) have to be that face to keep their issues alive and current, then fine. I still won't buy Nike's pretentious shit, but I will cheer Colin Kaepernick (and Assange and Snowden and whoever) on wholeheartedly. And if you want to protest Nike and its inhumane production practices, then donate your Swooshy gear to people who need clothing. Give it to those whose shoes are falling apart, whose clothes are filthy, who are in need. That is what we should be doing every day: looking after our fellow citizens across the world. Let's make Nike the unintended and inadvertent brand of compassion and generosity. 

Malcolm X said it in 1965: “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

And I'll go with a peaceful yet powerful means any day.