Director Roy Arauz

Revealing the Play’s World Through Action

Once upon a time, director Roy Arauz made the trek over to NWTW and workshopped six different scenes by six different playwrights, revealing to each of them what was in their pages, and what was missing.

Arauz focused primarily on the action and movement of each scene and let the playwrights witness the scene in motion, which taught each of us that we didn’t need so many words, that the action of the scene implied the stories beautifully enough on their own.

The most interesting workshopped scene to witness was a scene from Spellbinders, by Brad Bolchunos.

Intent, Stakes, and Motivation

At another New Works Workshop, we were fortunate enough to bring back Arauz. His quickness with a script, ability to see what was missing in the pages, and ability to direct in strong relationships between actors were ever dependable skills that brought out the potential gems of each script.

The actors brought the same irreplaceable skills that bring even unfinished characters life, and the playwrights brought pages as full of potential as problems.

Having him back highlighted the importance of having a strong idea for the play from the start. As he worked with the actors, it became easy to see which playwrights had a strong grasp on their intent with the play and which ones didn’t. With the playwrights who did, it was easier to see what information the pages were missing for their intent to be communicated in the scene.

Director Michelle Seaton

Objectives, Tactics, and Audience Understanding

When a handful of playwrights had the opportunity to workshop their scenes with director Michelle Seaton, she took them to task over the missing information an actor needs to be implied in a scene to be able to find their character. During the session, Seaton tirelessly questioned actors about their objectives, motivations and tactics, sought explanation of intent from the writers, and engaged the audience for feedback on what they understood about the characters, themes and story from what they saw happen on stage.

For Seaton, the audience has the last word in the success or failure of a scene. “A playwright is nothing without their audience,” she reminded us, quoting Arthur Miller’s well-known line.

Seaton’s focused approach with the actors allowed for subtle and enormous shifts with each reading of the scenes, and gave writers an opportunity to see how a clear objective and a tactic stated in a single verb can open a role for an actor, and how, when an actor embodies that objective and tactic, it makes a profound impact on the audience’s understanding of the character and the conflict of the scene.

Director Tamara Carroll 

Goals, Obstacles, and Status

In a workshop with director Tamara Carroll, Jonathan Hernandez and I got a chance to see them apply their wealth of new work experience to our latest scenes.

After a quick read-through of my work in progress, MARCH, the actors paused for Carroll to ask the audience what they had put together from the scene so far. The audience members stared back with blank faces.

Carroll acknowledged that the pages didn’t make it clear what character goals and obstacles were. They then asked what the goals and obstacles could be. Once each of the actors had defined a possible goal and obstacle, they worked on what tactics the characters might use to overcome their obstacles, slowly directing in a structure and arc to the scene the participants didn’t realize could be there.

Director Andrea White 

Deepening Motivation in Comedy

When an opportunity arose for playwrights Wayne Harrel, John Servilio, and yours truly to workshop a few scenes with local performer and director Andrea White, we jumped at the chance.

One of the scenes by playwright Wayne Harrel was from a full-length Western that, after a not-so-funny run-through, Harrel informed us was supposed to be funny. White ran a couple of actor exercises to get the actors to connect a bit better, then gave them a few notes about not pushing through jokes, allowing for discovery, and keeping their connection. They ran the scene again and the humor played beautifully.

When Harrel complimented White on her ability to see the script, she corrected him, stating that the motivations for the characters were too superficial to keep the actors engaged and connected in the scenes. She warned him that, although it is possible to get the actors to connect when running scenes, it’s much more difficult for the actors to maintain that connection if their motivations are that superficial scene after scene.

According to White, actors tend to speed up superficially-motivated scenes and cause the scenes to lose the humor and dynamics that work in the scene. She complimented him on how fun his scene was to watch, but suggested he work on deepening the characters and their motivation so that it doesn’t lose its humor and intended rhythm.

Another scene White workshopped was from Candied by John Servilio. White was impressed with the cleverness of the scene, but then dove into dissecting the character relationships, pointing out places where the relationships weren’t clearly defined. With the playwright’s permission, she then directed in possible fixes. When she was done, the depth of this comedic scene was surprising and breathtaking. She definitely brought it to another level and gave the playwright a hint on how he could strengthen the work.

White continued to workshop the remaining scenes with impressive proficiency, giving the playwrights insights into how they might better their scripts and providing much-needed, useful feedback.

Director Lindsey Bruno 

What a Director Can “Direct In”

When director Lindsey Bruno, from Milagro Theatre, paid NWTW a visit to workshop a handful of works-in-progress, they left the playwrights laughing, crying, and thankful for another chance to better their plays.

Bruno is no stranger to the sometimes bewildering discovery process every new play must undergo and made an excellent endeavor to motivate unmotivated scenes and show us how a director can “fix” a scene that doesn’t convey the playwright’s intent.

Playwright Kay Liechmal brought in a scene from her play, Firecracker, that was intended to show that a character felt trapped by their surroundings, despite the fact that the setting was wide open.

By directing the actor to move through the open space as though a set of invisible boundaries were actually prison walls, Bruno managed to change the color of every line and actually conveyed the playwright’s stated intent through the action.

As she started directing in a more precise set of motivated actions into characters’ choices throughout the scene, it transformed from meaningless verbal exchanges and non-sequiturs to a tense exchange of highly charged dialogue.

Playwrights stood dumbfounded, shocked at what she was able to “direct-in” to the scene. But Bruno reminded us that, although it is a director’s job to “make it work” no matter what material they’re given, when they direct a “fix” into a script like this one, they are “making it work” by actually doing the writer’s job:

Although a scene may appear to be built with dialogue, it’s actually built with actions that imply the playwright’s intent. Each character’s motivation for doing the actions implies who that character is and what their relationship is to everything else in the play. If a director is choosing what the narrative action of a scene is and deciding upon each character’s motivation for doing that action, then the director is the one creating the narrative with the actors, not the playwright. The playwright is only contributing the dialogue.

She pointed out that Liechmal’s dialogue is quite clever, so she’s glad to have it. She just wanted to make sure that we were aware what we witnessed was closer to a devised process. She advised Liechmal to keep in mind that when a devised piece is submitted for production consideration, the process usually involves submitting a video of previous productions because the script won’t convey the action and motivation on its own.

The workshop left us all with a great deal to think about and was a great reminder of how many different ways there are to make new work for the theatre.

Director Asae Dean 

Finding the Event Chain

When Asae Dean, artistic director at Salt & Stage, gave a handful of playwrights a chance to tinker with their scenes, they made a host of new discoveries about their work.

Dean was impressed by the wide variety of characters, topics, and style of work the playwrights have to offer, from Chekhov adaptations to obscure historical dramas and time-travel yarns, and offered several key insights as she worked the actors through one scene after another.

The most interesting piece workshopped was the one we thought was a time-travel yarn that the playwright intended to be a memory play. The piece managed to cover three scenes in less than ten pages. Although each short scene made sense on its own, together they were confusing and came across like the protagonist was time traveling rather than reminiscing, which was the playwright’s stated intent.

Dean then talked with the playwright about how she intended the event in each scene to move the characters, story, themes, ideas, or other theatrical elements forward. When the playwright struggled to answer, she began to work with the actors to try and identify how the sequence of stage activity could come together to form a unit of action, a significant event.

Once Dean was able to identify an event in each scene, she started to work with the actors to discover the relationship between each event and, slowly, we all began to see that if the scenes were rearranged, they would make sense and would no longer imply that the protagonist was time traveling.

With the playwright’s permission, Dean rearranged the scenes and ran through them one last time. Finally, the scenes took shape and played like the opening scenes of a memory play. It was impressive.

Sometimes all a playwright needs to get clarity on a scene is to see some part of their work on its feet. Other times, they need to witness a director work with actors to find a way to make the text work.

Playwrights who witnessed Dean at work, this writer included, recognized how event chains could be missing in their own material. She made us intentional consider the relationship between the events in our plays and pay closer attention to that going forward.

Director Francisco Garcia 

Conflict, Tension, and the Whole Play

When an opportunity was offered to workshop scripts-in-progress with director, playwright, and actor Francisco Garcia, local playwrights jumped at the chance.

Playwrights Jonathan Hernandez, Wayne Harrel, Yasmin Ruvalcaba, Adam Harrell, and myself were the lucky few who got the chance to work with him and make discoveries only his unique approach could bring about.

His patient and well-studied style suited the work well, and the playwrights in attendance were able to get some unique development experiences. Ruvalcaba’s scene, part of a harrowing story of a Hispanic mother recounting to her daughter her fateful crossing at the U.S. border, featured a captivating monologue delivered by astounding bilingual local actors.

After the scene work, Garcia led a thoughtful Q&A session with the playwrights, coaxing them to ask the right questions and think about how their scenes fit into the rest of their plays on the whole. He focused on how the scene plays into the overall conflict and the dramatic tension of the play. His questions were good.

We all walked away with a better understanding of what we were doing in our scenes and how those scenes would fit within the rest of our plays.

His way of talking about tension and conflict was different than how it’s talked about in the NWTW’s Rewrite workshop, which provides its cohort of playwrights with common dramaturgical language and tools to use as they help each other through the new play development process. It left us unsure of how to bring together what we were discovering with Garcia with the dramaturgical tools we use in the workshop.

When playwrights involved with the Rewrite workshop brought this concern up with Ciji Guerin, who leads the Rewrite workshop, she explained that directors tend to look at plot in terms of rise and fall, which becomes crucial at a certain point in the process. But, in the Rewrite workshop, we don’t look at plot or rise and fall. It’s a meaning first approach, so we look at how each individual plot line moves its protagonist through its thematic landscape.

Each plot line has a frontside and a backside. The backside of the plot line is what creates the dramatic tension, which is usually felt by the audience, but not seen. The frontside of the plot line is what creates the conflict that’s visible on the stage. The “overall” conflict is really something else that is created by all of the play’s conflicts: the conflicts of each plot line, relationship conflicts, inner conflicts, conflicting ideas; it’s the sum of everything in conflict within the play. If the world of the play is cohesive, the overall conflict should fall into place naturally. If the world is not cohesive, the conflict won’t fall into place.

The playwrights then reflected back on the questions Garcia asked them, and discussed the difference between Garcia’s and Guerin’s way of talking about conflict. As we did, we started to see how Garcia’s questions were trying to dig down into the conflicts the characters were facing, and asking us to see how those conflicts served the play as a whole. Once we saw that, we started to see how Garcia and Guerin’s approaches overlapped. They were just different ways to try and help us figure out what our plays are about by exploring the conflicts we have in our scenes.

Director Jessica Wallenfels

Actions and Revelations

Theatre experience has taught some of us to take everything with a grain of salt. We find almost no truism can hold out when it comes to putting something effective on stage. Every project, every piece, is different. Workshopping scenes with director Jessica Wallenfels was a good example of this phenomenon, and gave a counterweight to a lot of the guidance some of us received in college.

In college, many of us were taught as playwrights to “leave the directing to the director.” The first activity after choosing a piece to work on in Intro to Directing class was to black out all of the stage directions in the script. Until working with Wallenfels, some of us would find little more than lines of dialogue in our plays.

When she revealed she needed more than was on the page, saying, “I’m not supposed to tell a director what to do,” sounded silly. But she understood the point. “Verbs,” she said, “give me somewhere to begin, and, sometimes, something that I can pull through the whole piece.” She then answered a question or two from playwrights observing the workshop.

In the tablework workshops with NWTW, verbs get talked about a lot. Verbs that open a play for attentive, text-savvy directors like Wallenfels are intentional in our work—flags that point to the attributes of our characters and settings, that highlight associations characters have with each other, their world, and the concepts within it. Those attributes and associations are the building blocks of the thematic conflict we’re trying to build page-by-page. They don’t cage a director, they inform. They reveal the story.

Although Wallenfels has never attended any of our tablework sessions, she clearly already knows this. She added that writing parenthetical actions like (folding laundry) or (dancing) in our scripts does not define how these actions are done, and yet can crack open a play’s themes for her—or at least give the actors something engaging before they say one word.

All of this is still said with some salt, but we were excited to see more verbs in our work, and curious to how it might open things up.

What Workshops With Directors Make Clear

Working with directors does more than help playwrights hear their dialogue or see whether a scene “works.” It exposes the invisible architecture of the play. It shows where the action is clear and where it is missing, where a character’s motivation is alive and where an actor has been left to invent it, where the world of the play is implied and where it still needs to be built. Repeatedly, the strongest discoveries came when directors asked questions: What does the character want? What is stopping them? What action is happening here? What does the audience understand from what they are seeing?

Playwrights had often asked those questions during their writing process, but did not realize the answers were not coming across on the page clearly enough for actors and directors to make use of them.

For playwrights, the gift of working with directors is that they reveal what is and is not on the page.

That revelation can be uncomfortable. It should be. But it is also one of the most useful parts of developing new work. A workshop with a strong director gives the playwright a chance to see the distance between the play they’re trying to write and the play they’ve actually written.

It is also a reminder of why the development process is collaborative. It’s a conversation between the page and the stage, between the playwright’s intention and the actor’s action, between what we mean to say and what we actually say. And when that conversation is generous, rigorous, and alive, it helps the play become more fully itself.