On playwriting

A look at the authors behind the plays, and their struggle to see their work performed

By Robert Von Stein Redick

We go to the shows. We clap, or we crib. Over time, we develop a taste for the work of this director or that; we admire one actor’s gift for righteous fury, pray that another will stop trying to be cute. We are mostly white and well-off, and somewhat preoccupied by the fact. We are the discerning consumers of theater.

But what we see in the auditorium is only a small part of any given production, the blossom opening its petals to the longed-for sun. The stem and leaves that sustain it are hidden backstage, in lighting booths, behind the sound mixer. Critics, true, are inescapable, like the mud (or mulch, or mealy bugs) that come with having a flower patch. But the seed itself? Forgotten. Ignored. How many of us look at daffodils and think seeds?

And yet that’s where it all starts: with the seed of an idea in a playwright’s mind. An idea that must be nurtured, doted upon, coaxed to germination in writing nooks and offices about as glamorous as those little styrofoam cups we sprouted beans in as kindergartners. No glitzy stage, no embarrassment of Broadway riches, has altered the fact. The spectacle we love begins with a single, definitely solitary, man or woman.

In Maine, playwrights have been at work continuously, and in respectable numbers, since at least the early 1920s, when Edna St. Vincent Milay wrote Two Slatterns and a King and Owen Davis won the Pulitzer for Icebound. Today’s playwrights are as busy as ever, despite an exceptional number of competing media. Yet one can spend a long time on the fringes of the Portland theater community without getting a look at them.

The chief explanation for this is that only a small fraction of the plays written in Maine are ever produced here. New shows are risks embraced; old chestnuts and post-New York success stories less so. But it is from precisely those risky premieres, inside or outside Manhattan, that Broadway renews its stock. Listen to some of our region’s working playwrights, as they discuss their craft, its rewards and frustrations, and what you need to make a go of it in northern New England.

One incentive for pursuing these playwrights now is the fact that others are: specifically the staff of the Acorn School for the Performing Arts. For their first Maine Playwrights Festival, Acorn solicited scripts from both established and aspiring playwrights across the state. Some 22 responded. The three winners received a small cash prize, and more importantly, a staged reading with student actors and input from Mike Levine, director of the Acorn School and many local productions. The readings took place at the school’s Congress Street Studio, March 29 through 31.

In establishing a playwrights’s contest, Acorn is joining in a widespread tradition — one many artists describe as essential. Around the country, playwrights get noticed through competitions and festivals. Some of these, like that of the Eugene O’Neil Center or Hollywood’s National Play Award, are capable of catapulting a script and its author into that thin stratosphere of critical and financial success. Most alter a writer’s circumstances more modestly, but can still mark a turning point in his or her career. A key part of the prize in almost every case is an interpretation: a staged reading, a workshop session with actors and a director, even a brief production. The national contest of the Actors’ Theater of Louisville, for example, showcased early works by Marsha Norman and Beth Henley, both of whom have since built national reputations with works such as ‘Night, Mother and Crimes of the Heart, respectively. Many contests are region-specific: New England residents alone may apply to Northeastern University’s John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award.

Acorn’s festival is more exclusive still, but for a state struggling to earn recognition for both its dramatists and its history, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The winning full-length drama, Tim Wilson’s The Potato Pickers, could hardly have been more local in its concerns. A memory play about an Aroostook County family of French-speaking agricultural workers, Wilson’s play jumps back and forth between 1953 and 2000, exploring the life of a boy transplanted from urban Connecticut to the wild Maine woods at age six, and the mysteries of the family he discovers there.

Wilson remains something of an outsider himself. An illustrator from Westport, Connecticut, Wilson came to Portland 13 years ago. Before the contest he had “nothing at all to do” with the local theater community.

“I work completely in a vacuum,” he says. “I’m not really affiliated with any group, any theater lab. It’s always a challenge to find people to bring it to life on any level. Sometimes I’ve turned to actors like this, at other times I’ve had friends sitting around in my living room.”

GIVING DIRECTION: feedback is a valuable part of the Maine Playwrights Festival.

The actors Wilson turned to this time sat in a long row at the front of the Acorn studio, interpreting the 10 parts (with success as variable as their levels of experience), while Levine read stage directions and a small audience listened in. Afterwards, Levine solicited feedback from the onlookers: what moved them? What failed to? Was anything distracting, surprising, out of place? Wilson listened intently, notebook in hand. Afterwards he pronounced himself reasonably satisfied — although noting wryly that too much satisfaction is probably in no one’s artistic interest.

The vital thing, he insists, is the move from paper to performance. “You look for breathing, speaking people to give it a go, and that’s just essential, because what you have is a script and it becomes a play once it’s spoken. I stop hearing the voices that I’ve conjured in my imagination and begin to hear it as others imagine it.

“I’d like to be able to do this sort of thing more often,” Wilson admits. “It would be nice if there was a theater lab here in Maine, because we are a little isolated. A group of actors to be called upon for just this sort of purpose. It helps the actors with their craft, and for playwrights it’s just invaluable.”

Levine concurs. For student actors, the staged readings offer “a chance to bite into something more substantial than a monologue.” And playwrights find an avenue out of their own heads “and maybe a spark of encouragement, which can be very difficult to get around here. Of all our activities at Acorn, this is really the one with the most benefit for the local scene.”

One person who must have felt that spark of encouragement is New Gloucester resident Payne Ratner. The same evening that the Playwrights Festival concluded, something similar was happening down the street in a private gallery. Members of the Mad Horse Theater Company participated in a staged reading of his new play, Infestation, a “wild romp” about a child who says he’s been abducted by aliens; his mother; and her boyfriend, an exterminator specializing in invisible bugs. Directors Joan Sand and Andrew Sokoloff were on hand to give advice, and with good reason: they’ve thought enough of Ratner’s plays to produce several already, most recently Repossession.

A native of Wichita, Kansas, Ratner came here after college some 14 years ago; his day job is composing commercials for WCSH Channel 6. By the time he left Kansas, Ratner had acted in several productions and written a dozen one-act plays. His first full-length script, Home Again, was written in Brunswick, where it saw a “ramshackle” production that dealt a hard blow to Ratner’s confidence. One of the actors dropped out late in the game, and Ratner himself stepped in to fill the gap. “After that — no way will I ever act in a piece I’ve written. There’s no baffle, no separation between you and the words.” His fears were shortly confirmed: the production was harshly reviewed, and for several years he quit writing plays altogether.

Fortunately, Ratner didn’t give up on the artistic life. In the intervening years, he turned to fiction writing, acted in several Theater Project shows, and bit by bit felt the returning urge to write for the stage. Momentum built quickly: first the Mad Horse productions, then a radio adaptation of his play Fish Out of Water by San Francisco Public Radio, then publication of several of his one-acts, including Virgin Territory, which premiered at last year’s Boston Theater Marathon.

Beantown has been good to Ratner. A turning point came with acceptance into the Boston Playwright’s Theater, a two-year M.A. program at Boston University founded by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. This program, which accepts only four to six students per year, convenes equity and student actors, along with seasoned teachers of playwriting, to workshop a script. After a reading or performance, it’s back to the writer’s nook for a month or two of revision; then the actors return and the process repeats. And repeats. For an entire year. As Ratner describes it, this persistent access to interpretation creates an environment in which the learning is concentrated and amplified. Without the Boston experience, he muses, his writing today would be “hugely different. I still have a lot to learn, but now I know how to keep the learning going.”

GIVING VOICE: seeing your work performed is invaluable.

Not that all of this affirmation has brought him artistic tranquility. Larger productions are a particular goal, “the next step,” as he describes it. How does Maine fit into those plans? Ratner isn’t sure, but he keenly appreciates the value of his long-term ties to the theater community, especially when his scripts call out for attention. Gathering actors together for a night’s reading is never a problem, he says. In this sense, “the city of Portland is wonderful. Even compared to Boston, I found this to be a place of generally higher quality, and a more committed group.” Such quality, he believes, “is a testament to the great directors we have here.”

A classmate of Ratner’s in the Boston Program, Scarborough resident Karmo Sanders is a Maine native, “sort of an endangered species, at least in the southern part of the state.” Sanders also entered theater as an actor: four years with Seacoast Repertory in Portsmouth, and later, many stints with Mad Horse and the Theater Project.

Nor is she shy to endorse the benefits of time on stage. “Truthfully I can’t imagine being a playwright without being an actor,” she tells me with a laugh. “I’m sure that sounds like an arrogant statement, but it’s just how I’ve found things. I’ve seen many productions when you just know that [the playwright] actually has no idea about what takes place on stage.” To lack a first-hand sense grasp of what one demands of actors, she believes, is to risk foundering in poorly-constructed scenes. “It would be like being an architect without ever having picked up a hammer.”

After her years in the regional theaters, Sanders picked up a hammer of her own in 1994 by performing in Radical Radio, a musical comedy of her own creation. It toured the east coast for four years, from Staten Island to Manhattan to Portland’s own State Theatre. “The challenge is that in order for us to have any status, we had to open off-Broadway and get those New York reviews. What you get in this area just won’t give you the foundation you need to move on. The Portland Press Herald won’t get us booked on the eastern seaboard.”

And Sanders does hope to move on. Her work in progress, about “sex and gold in the Yukon,” is quite possibly Broadway material, in Ratner’s opinion. Provisionally titled River of Gold and inspired by Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush (Graphic Arts, paperback, 1999) a scholarly book by Lael Morgan (publisher of Casco Bay Weekly), the play received its first reading at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater last year, where the participants “loved the music and hated the text, and that was okay.” Indeed, such feedback is what one pays tuition for, and Sanders appears to thrive on it. “My experience as a playwright is that when something wants out, you have to get out your pen and let it talk.”

So will River of Gold debut in Maine? Not likely, she says, considering the play’s grand scale. “It’s fully orchestrated. Even Portland Stage would be a stretch. But it’s not space, it’s funding. It’s always funding, isn’t it?”

Like Ratner, however, Sanders hopes somehow to hold onto a Maine writer’s life even as she shares her work with the country at large. “This is as wonderful a place to write as anywhere. The community of actors is strong, and we all know each other and appreciate each other’s work.”

The challenge, as she sees it, is the wrinkled-nose factor — the little flinch that still can occur when outsiders hear the words theater and Maine in the same sentence. “There’s just not a lot of respect,” Sanders argues. “I’d love to have something big go, just to be able to say, ‘Guess where I’m from? And all those folks are up there working like sons of guns.’ ” If Ratner’s predictions hold up, she may get the chance.

Most Maine playwrights have day jobs, but Clay Graybeal’s had some unusual dividends for the writing life. A Portlander for many years, Graybeal is a counselor and a professor of social work at the University of New England. The first advantage he cites is free summers. But more significant was the insight into human nature that such work affords. “The characters in The Calling [Graybeal’s first play] were all people with whom I’m intimately acquainted. All the issues were things that I have experience with. That’s part of why it went so quickly.”

The Calling has seen two highly lauded productions in Portland, each starring Deborah Hall and directed by Michael Rafkin, who praises Graybeal for writing “one of the best first plays I’ve ever read.” The maxim about “writing what you know” appears vindicated once again. But Graybeal had something else going for him: Deborah Hall is his wife. A founding member of Mad Horse and several other theater companies, Hall introduced Graybeal to some of the leading figures in the community. “I feel like I sort of leaped over all the preliminaries,” he says. Moreover, Graybeal “knew Deb had the ability to go the horrific places I was writing about.” And it was Hall herself who first challenged the social worker to try his hand at playwriting, as an outlet for things he could never say in an academic paper.

Despite his teaching duties, Graybeal’s just workshopped his second play, Shadowsouls, with Rafkin, Hall, and actor/stage manager Kate O’Neil. “I was thrilled [by the response],” he says. “People were very positive about it, and spewed all kinds of ideas.” Once again, the name of the game appears to be collaboration.

Another winner of the Acorn School’s contest is Portland resident Carolyn Gage, who introduced herself as “extremely ambitious, extremely serious about my work.” Not that anyone could doubt it. The author of more than forty plays, Gage is also a solo performer, lecturer, nonfiction author, the founder of three theater companies, and one of the most accomplished voices in lesbian theater. A roster of her drama activities and honors could fill this page; among the highlights are the top prize in the 1988 Samuel French Off-Off Broadway award for Harriett Tubman Visits a Therapist, selection of the same for the Actors Theatre of Louisville summer festival, first prize at the Moondance International Women’s Film Festival for Sappho in Love, and a spectacular run for her one-woman play The Second Coming of Joan of Arc in Brazil, where it has grossed half a million in the past year. The latter triumph represents her first crack at “Broadway-level money,” but she’s not counting it yet: the roughly $50,000 in royalty checks have vanished into a government agency that managed the tour, and so far Gage has seen nothing but a $1500 advance.

CLAY GRABEAL: he found his Calling as a playwright through his experiences as a counselor.

Gage intends to fight for her royalties; but for the moment she had better things to talk about than money. One of these is the challenge of building acceptance for serious lesbian theater. “It’s very difficult,” she says with quiet emphasis. Lesbian theater, she argues, is “its own thing with its own ways,” and tells a story that much of America’s theater audience hasn’t learned to listen to. Recalling an early reading of The Parmachene Bell , the Acorn competition winner about a lesbian wilderness guide with a crush on Annie Oakley, Gage notes that the actors were “people approaching a cultural artifact with really no background in my culture.” It stands to reason: no one expects an actor who knows precisely nothing about Italians to make a good Corlioni, yet somehow we conclude that where lesbian (or gay male) culture is concerned, we can wing it.

But the challenge for lesbians goes further, Gage says, because they face both homophobia and misogyny rolled into one. Increasingly, gay male drama is finding acceptance among heterosexuals as well as gays — witness the Hollywood gentlemen, from Antonio Banderas to Patrick Stewart, prepared to tackle homosexual roles. But love between women remains a threat, Gage says, and hence “lesbian theater will often not be supported even by gay men.”

Our own region, Gage believes, imposes another hurdle. “Maine is unique, because the tourist trade is such a big part of the cultural life, especially the theater. New plays are risky, so someone like myself without a big track record has it tough.” Hypercautious theater management can’t be blamed for it all, she says; in a world of shaky financing “it’s real risky to do anything but Guys and Dolls.”

Only by embracing risk do theater companies break their creative shackles. But risk-tolerance is a scarce commodity. “I have a play [Ugly Ducklings, set in a Maine summer camp] that I’d love to see go up in the Portland area,” says Gage. “But this is a lesbian play that features girls — and girls who know that they’re lesbians by age 12.” Despite persistent marketing efforts, no theater company in the area has expressed an interest in producing Ducklings — although Bates College did undertake a student production in 1997. Gage suspects that the reason has more to do with subject matter than the quality of the play. Portlanders flock to see their children in A Christmas Carol, but could they look squarely at a girl driven to attempt suicide by a world that denies her sexuality?

Not all Gage’s work is so dark — but all of it comes from an artist who refuses to dilute her lesbian experience into an empty-calorie frolic a la Ellen Degeneres. Settle questions of cause and effect as you will, but the fact remains that outside the Bates College production, no Carolyn Gage play has found a staging in the state she calls home.

John Black knows what that’s like. He moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from his home state of Illinois, but two decades would pass before he saw one of his plays produced there. “I didn’t know any playwrights. I didn’t know anybody.” But this wasn’t the start of his playwriting career. He had already studied and taught drama at Villanova and Quincy College, Illinois; he had lived in the East Village “at the time Sam Shepard was a waiter at La Mama, ” and shared a room with David Rabe in 1972, the year that playwright won a Tony Award.

Off and on throughout these years, Black wrote plays, although his work was largely ignored. “It’s a curious torture. Not much question about that. Nobody needs you. If I never wrote another thing nobody would notice. You really have to do it for yourself.”

In Portsmouth he took a job as a dishwasher, and kept at his writing (including an avant-garde novel) in spare hours in the back room of a small Dover apartment, aided by cigarettes and a portable typewriter, and offering a word of thanks to God for each page he finished. When The Last Ticket Home came together, he gave it to the director of the Player’s Ring — and never received a response. It was not until years later, after the director’s death, that his successor called to say that he had found and loved the script. Black laughs at the memory. “There’s no ‘how-to’ in any of this. I sent that thing everywhere, to California, New York — and the one place that came through was right in my own back yard.” This January, Last Ticket finally premiered.

“People say you have to be proud or egotistical. I think you have to be very humble. You can’t see if you’re in the way.”

Not much unites these playwrights, ultimately. They come from different places, seek different ends, tell radically different stories with their art. Yet one commonality emerges loud and clear: the importance of hearing and seeing one’s work in the voices and bodies of actors, as soon as and as often as possible. Not one playwright, director, or producer failed to stress the transformative nature of a trial run. Sanders puts it simply: “What a playwright needs is a base of actors.” For Graybeal, those initial readings taught him “to trust the actors to show it” rather than spelling out every moment in words, like a novelist.

Festivals like the Acorn School’s are a frequent path to such stagings. A smaller number of writers find the support in the academy. Working with Walcott’s group, says Sanders, was “an amazing experience. Within five minutes you know if you’ve hit the mark or not.”

But for all six writers, relationships with small, independent theater companies have been key. Fragile as they often are, such institutions are still the best chance many playwrights have for a community. It is the theatergoer’s task to remember the services these artistic greenhouses provide — and to help them defend the real estate they occupy.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.