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Purchased the binders, printed scripts, punched holes, and brought all to the first rehearsal. First read through, Monday, February 7, 6:30, entire cast called.

First :30 minutes was an discussion/overview of the playwright festival with Beth Wood and Lindsay Carter. Contracts were distributed to actors. Discussion of workshop production a Black Box (+).

David Todd came by to check the reading out and give feedback. And at 7:00pm we were underway. The whole of it took :84 minutes give or take an interruption or two. And, of course, it was good to hear the full emanating voices from real people: as opposed to some thing clanking around in my head.

We broke for :10 minutes and Todd and I agreed to meet up at Gypsy Bean tomorrow to talk about the reading and the script. After break, Zoldessy outlined the plan for the rest of the week, which included his approach to getting the play up: blocking, blocking, blocking. (For those of my readers who aren’t theater people, blocking is figuring out where actors will be and how they will move in the space.) Zoldessy’s goal is to get Patterns fully blocked by Wednesday, February 16th. That’s a tight schedule and given the weirdness of my play: ambitious.

I’m not sure how to describe this next thing… but here’s a shot: You, as the writer, must be interested in the EFFECT of your work on the audience (keeping in mind that any single thing will have different effects across individuals, because they’re experiencing the play through their own, unique filters). So you should go into the post-reading discussion knowing what effects you hoped to have on the majority of the audience, and be prepared to find ways of discovering whether or not those effects were achieved in the majority of the audience, when you wanted them to happen.

I emailed David Moore who had a blog (he moved it) named DAM* Writer prior to my staged reading and he was kind enough to answer (even though I was oblivious enough to miss the email he sent–only having discovered it in the new year). The quote above is from him, and to me it was very illuminating. For some reason I just plowed through my play-creation process, knowing the story I wanted to tell (in some cases) and just writing (in others). I was aware that the Aristotelean approach to playwriting existed–but naively, the point of it never hit me until I read David’s thoughts.

I emphasize the “effect” thing because there’s no right or wrong to writing. There’s only what you wanted to achieve, and whether or not you achieved it.

He’s right. Your write to achieve an effect, and you either do or you don’t. This certainly neutralizes a lot of the crap that tended to build-up along the side of my playwriting process. That is, it tells me what to focus on (at least, primarily) and what to ignore. I’ll leave you with a bit more of what he said and posit it, here, as a final thought:

Sure, those who want formulaic plays will demand resolution, clarification, too much information, etc. And if that’s the play you want to write, that’s perfectly valid. But no matter what kind of play you want to write, no matter what the intended audience (artsy-fartsy or Middle America), it all comes down to this: What do you, the writer, want? You’re the artist — how do you want the audience to experience the play, or specific scenes/moments in the play? What do you want them talking about when they go home? How did you want them to feel throughout the play, or at specific points in the play? What rhythms were you hoping to achieve? What themes or ideas did you hope to put under the microscope?