“YOU’RE THERE, BABY”

Jeffrey Hatcher

I never started out to be a playwright.  I wanted to be an actor.  Most of the playwrights I know – and director and designers and every other “backstage” job in the profession --  got their start as actors.  It’s the most natural point of entry into the business.  It’s also the most glamorous.   But, as the years go by, most of us peel away from acting.  We realize we’re not cut out for it, or our passion for performing fades, or maybe someone we respect says: “Do you think you’d like to try your hand at some other aspect of the biz?”  -- which is code for: “Take a hint and dump the greasepaint, pal.”

I came into the theater wanting to be noticed and applauded. Laurence Olivier, the greatest actor of the English speaking stage, was once asked why he became an actor, and he said: “Because I wanted people to LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!”

Nobody looks at a playwright. At least not during his play. The playwright stands at the back of the theater.  He watches the show from the very last row.  When the audience laughs, the sound goes away from the playwright, not towards him. The best he can say – during a laugh, or during the curtain call, or while the audience is holding its breath at the play’s most suspenseful moment – is “I did that.”  And he has to whisper it.  To himself. It’s a very private applause.

I’m very glad I started out as an actor. In the best of all possible worlds, every playwright would spend time as an actor, as a director, as a designer. He’d help build and paint sets.  He’d be on a running crew and call a show from the booth. He’d also sell tickets to audiences who aren’t always eager to buy. It would give him a better appreciation for certain theatrical requirements, such as – what it’s like to re-memorize a script the writer keeps revising; what it’s like to design the set for a play that includes the direction “an island crashes to the stage;” what it’s like to sell tickets for a new play with a title like “All Adults Are Hateful and Fat.”  (news flash: most ticket buyers are adults)

If I were king, every playwright would also spend lots of time in a theater, sitting in the house, prowling the backstage, staring into the wings and up at the flies. Just as some great plays have been written for specific actors, some great plays have been written for specific theater spaces. What play would you write for the space called Florida Stage? Knowing what you do about its size, its acoustics, its sightlines, its seats and aisles. Would it be a different script if the seating was 1000 seats larger? 150 seats smaller? If it had fly-space. If there was a trap door. And if you wrote a play that was custom-made for that space, could it be performed just as easily on a Broadway stage or the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or in your garage? HAMLET can be performed on any stage. So can ANGELS IN AMERICA and THE ODD COUPLE. They expand or contract depending on the particulars, but they always work. But try to do a French farce on a thrust stage or, worse, a stage designed in-the-round.

Another reason to spend time in a theater – any theater – is that it reminds a playwright that he’s writing for it and not television or the movies or the pages of The New Yorker.  The desire to write plays is sometimes a diverted desire.  I know scores of talented writers whose real gift was for the big screen, the small screen or the novel.  But it took a good few years of failing at the very particular demands of the stage to clue them in.

The late director Lloyd Richards, who won Tony Awards for A RAISIN IN THE SUN and FENCES, once told me a story about August Wilson, also now dead.  We were at the O’Neill Center where Lloyd ran the National Playwrights Conference for many years.  I was talking about the difference between writing for the stage and writing for the screen, and Lloyd said that in one of August’s early plays, a character was supposed to come into his house, dripping wet, soaked to the skin by a torrential rain. Then the scene was to end. The next scene took place weeks later with the same character in his kitchen drinking coffee. Lloyd said, “What August didn’t realize was that in the theater the actor playing that role would have to go offstage, peel off those wet clothes, get dry, put on new clothes, towel off his hair, comb it, go back on stage and sit down for that cup of coffee. That would have taken ten minutes.  You can’t do that in the theater. August hadn’t learned that yet.  His talent was already there, but he’d grown up watching more movies and tv shows than plays. On TV, you cut from one scene to another, and the scenes may have been shot weeks apart.  But with the theater…you’re there, baby.”

Be there.

Click here to see Jeffrey Hatcher's biography and click here to buy his plays.