Picking A Play Apart

The most liberating thing I ever learned about writing was that you didn't have to get it right the first time.

You could always rewrite.

That took a tremendous amount of pressure off getting that first draft done, which was always the hardest thing to do in the first place.

Once it's out of your head and down on paper, it's much easier to manage, and to fix.

And of course, the more you write, if you're learning anything, the better your first drafts get.

But you have to give yourself permission to write badly, or you'll never write at all.

You need the manure to grow the flowers.

The friends who make up my writing group over the years have seen some pretty horrific first drafts - which, being good friends, they're always happy to remind me of and kid me about, particularly when I get a little full of myself.

An actor friend once described them as "poop drafts" - where I get just everything on my mind to just plop out on the page, vomitting it all up, good - bad - or indifferent.

Then the sorting begins.

The trickier thing is to know when to leave well enough alone. When does rewriting become a game of diminishing returns, where you're actually doing the script more harm than good by continuing to play around with it? When have you learned all you can from a story?

They say good art is never done, it just stops in interesting places.

This particular story stopped in one place in 1999.

It stopped in a very different one in 2008.

The question is, does it still have a little traveling to do, or should I leave it alone?

Right now I'm revisiting the script for "Leave," which is going to be part of the Great Plains Theater Conference at the end of May, beginning of June. In fact, I just got an email the other day saying the reading of "Leave" would be bright and early, first slot on Monday morning June 1, 9am. So I have a couple of days to drum up a little good will and hopefully get people to show up and watch the thing.

And I have exactly two months (minus a few hours) to tinker with the script, if I want to.

The possible revision of "Leave" is really prompted by the upcoming production by Urban Samurai, however. That's still 10 months out.

The 2008 version of the script had a space it needed to squeeze into - a 90-minute space on the Bryant Lake Bowl calendar. And it did. Just barely.

"Leave" landed on Lavender Magazines Top Ten List for theater in 2008, so in its current form, it packs a punch.

But it always felt a little cramped to me.

In having my first talk with Matt Greseth, who's going to direct, he zeroed in on one place in particular that interested him.

The story is about the emotional fallout caused by the "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring gays from serving openly in the military. A former soldier and a Marine argue their positions. The ex-Army guy wants to serve, but won't go back into the closet to do it. They want him to do their killing for him, they'll have to accept him as he is. The active duty Marine feels like this is a cop-out, that the other guy's a coward. The larger question is, why do we even force people to make this decision? And since we do, why would you want to serve a country (perhaps at the cost of your life) when that country doesn't value who you are as a person? Why do you still feel a sense of duty to a country that would ask you to do that?

The scene, and play, as they stand address this to a degree, but Matt feels there's more meat to dig into there.

So that's one spot that might grow.

I've reread the script, backwards, a scene at a time, from the end to the beginning, to study the current structure.

The squeeze is going to be tight at the conference, so I could change, but probably not expand, the script - they deal with long one-acts, not full-lengths.

But if the story feels good at full-length, Urban Samurai would present it in that form. We have the theater for the evening. How much of the evening we use is up to us.

So...

Where do the rewrites lie...?

Matthew A. Everett
www.matthewaeverett.com
USP Board Member, Resident Playwright

Bright Ideas opens in 35 days
Great Plains Theatre Conference starts in 58 days
Minnesota Fringe Festival arrives in 125 days
Leave, via Urban Samurai, 10 months off