Individual

The playwriting intensive worked progressively in the sense that it was first about raw technique with little attention to creativity and ended with loose instructions allowing us to pull together our improved technique with creativity. This is not to say that no creativity was involved in the earlier workshops, but the need for it was minimized so that we could focus on the specific aspect of playwriting we were working to improve on. I found the intensive to be successful for this reason. The sense of jetting through in the earlier workshops followed through to the later ones that required more of a thought process.
The assignment for the first intensive illustrates this minimization of thought process. We were to think up the last argument we’d had and write it as a six page play. Knowing my own weakness in making decisions, I picked the first long fight I could remember and chose to write that one. I didn’t try to make it the best script it could be, but rather I turned on autopilot and wrote it just as it came to mind. The challenge came when we then had to cut down the six page script to a three page script. To do this, I examined what was at the core of the six page script. The script I was writing was a fight between a girl and her mother over beer found in the girl’s closet. When refining the script, I strived to maintain the essence of the first script rather than something more superfluous like its details or structure. Some details and structure elements were used to maintain the essence, but they were not the thing to keep in mind. At the core of my characters was the mother’s desire to keep her daughter young and the daughter’s need for freedom, so this was what I tried to keep in the three page script and then again when refining it down to a one page script.
The next assignment followed naturally. It again required an ability to find the essence of the script and of the characters’ motives. We were to write two different versions of an apology. The first would be direct, and the second would be indirect, meaning rather than a straightforward apology, the apology would be more implied. This approach would most likely yield a more realistic scene. However, because the original scene had been written about a real fight that I’d had and that was never fully resolved, I couldn’t get myself to write an apology. So the art entered the intensive very early for me, and this workshop taught me more of a lesson of separation. Had I been able to separate myself from the script, I would have been able to write an apology. In art, there is not a thick line between the personal and the universal, and this day of the workshop reminded me of this. It is okay for work to be personal, as long as you can keep some separation from it.
That day turned from a product day to a research day, and I read Clifford Odets’ Rocket to the Moon. Odets seems to be the master of characters. I was surprised at how much I understood about his characters that was only implied. This gave me a little more confidence that I could say more with less. I found his writing to be both believable and poetic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Odets

Slowly, the workshops became looser and allowed for some more creativity. The next thing we did was write three scenes from the life of an object, and this was written in the form of a screenplay. This exercised two areas. First, as a screenplay, I was forced to consider visuals. Although this is perhaps more important in a screenplay than in a stage play, I found that even my dialogue improved when writing in this form. Because I wrote it by seeing it in my head rather than thinking up appropriate dialogue, it came off more realistic and simply better. In this workshop, I was also drawing on what I’d done previously. I looked for the essence of each scene before writing it and then was able to construct interesting dialogue that got across interesting relationships between complex characters.
The art really came into the intensive with the assignment to write a play based on song lyrics which we were given. The only other limitations were on the number of characters and the length of the play. With fewer limitations, it is always more difficult to begin, and I needed a little push to get started. Here I encountered the lesson that it has been my goal to keep in my head, which is that inspiration can and should be taken from anywhere, and it does not matter if the final outcome of a piece of work matches the inspiration. It will match no matter what. In comes the idea of the universal. I didn’t especially like the script I wrote for this part of the intensive. It started with a hole that I never figured out how to close. It began with a girl hiding in a closet and a boy curious why she was there, and that question was never answered. What I did like about it was its poetic feel. I was trying to mimic Odets in this sense. I think that I as a writer appeared in this script stylistically more than I did in the others. In this way, this script came at an appropriate time. After learning to write interesting dialogue in an effective manner, I suppose the next step would be to establish a style.
Another playwright we studied was Harold Pinter, and we focused on adopting his use of pauses and silences for points of tension. I found this exercise to be very difficult to write with, but very useful when directing. After the intensive, I directed one of the scenes I had written and I found it was easier to employ the pauses when I was able to see the scene happening before me and sense where they belonged. This shows me that directing scenes will also help me improve my writing. Hopefully I will learn to get the feel for the pauses and silences enough so that I can see it in my head and write them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/arts/dance/10pint.html?pagewanted=all
The challenge of writing these scenes grew steadily as I had to take the techniques I’d learned in the early workshops and use them all together, but it felt like it happened naturally and that the techniques were somewhat engrained in my head because I had already used them. I am pleased with how much writing got done throughout the intensive, and what I took away from it was that it is not enough to know but you must use what you know in order to improve.