Today, I met with Rebecca Bossen who is a playwright. We talked about the process of how plays get produced, stage directions and the importance of research. First, she explained the process of production. Basically, you start out by writing the play and “toiling over it” for however long that takes. Then, you enter it in contests or submit to theaters (which all have specific varying rules) for stage readings, but your piece can get stuck in stage writing purgatory if you continue to fuss over it. It’s important to have real people reading it and working with it so it can evolve into being more realistic/alive. Once you’re more satisfied with the script, you submit it to theaters for productions. There’s a whole business side of this, but Ms. Bossen claimed that she’s not too savvy with that, advising me to research it to get more knowledge. The involvement in the “world premiere” production of a piece depends on the director, playwright and theater, but it’s important to give the actors space to play with the work and find their own choices. She uses the metaphor of having a baby and handing it to someone who’s going to hold it over a ledge while asking them not to drop it. During rehearsals is like making sure the baby isn’t covered with Crisco. Overall, she used parenting as a metaphor for playwrighting because you create something that starts as just yours, but then it spreads out more and more and then it “moves to New York and becomes a lawyer”. Second, we discussed stage directions and she told me three important things. 1. if it’s something that can be communicated in the conversation/scenes in a play, put it there 2. tell them what to do but not how to do it (ie saying something like “the stage fills with water” which needs to happen, but the director can make the choice how) and 3. give them enough that they can make sense of the play. Third, we talked about research and Ms. Bossen laughed when I asked about it because she literally has a powerpoint on it. She pulled it up and explained to me that while there is such thing as too much research, you owe it to whoever you’re writing about to do some. Her main piece of advice is, “Everybody knows something”. You can do general research, like for her play Delilah Lee which is an Appalachian ghost story where she read a lot of Appalachian ghost stories or specific historical research. For example, Ms. Bossen is in the process of doing research for Delia Bacon, a famous author who had a theory that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare. Her process for this research was a spark, a latent period, reading books, getting grants, travelling, the rabbit hole and now, the writing. While speaking about her process, she showed me a picture of Folger Library, which she calls “Hogwarts for Shakespeare nerds” and a letter that Delia Bacon wrote asking how “her little Rebecca is”, which Ms. Bossen referred to as her “creepy magic moment”. However, no human being can reasonably completely know someone else, so you need to eventually get the story onto the page and out into the world. We are planning to meet again this Thursday, which I’m very excited for.
