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Mike Sepesy’s play is the second in a trilogy of plays that involve families in a tangle of tragic events wrapped in mystical and elusive images that allow the present world to blend seamlessly with what is mythic or lying under the pond of our unconscious. The first being The Alice Seed, which I saw as a reading at the Cleveland Play House early last year and which will be fully staged this fall at Cleveland Public Theatre.

The action largely revolves around Douglas “Dougie” (Allen Branstein) a grown man who is stuck like a tree and cannot move forward with his life: whether his stuckness is due to a metaphysical ailment, a bump on the head he received as a teenager or his alcoholism is difficult to answer. Dougie’s stuckness is altered however when his long-ago ex-girlfriend Cass (Molly McGinnis)—from just before he fell from the truck and bumped his head—shows up to tell him that after that long-ago summer she had a daughter, Rose, (Virginia Konchan) and Dougie is a dad. Dougie, who was planning to kill himself, says that meeting a daughter is worth a few days, and decides to stick around and see what’s what—including that his daughter has brittle bones; her boyfriend, Marc, (James Kosmatka) is an appalling ass; and transforming himself and becoming un-stuck—finding the courage to move forward with his life: a courage for which Dougie’s father, Larry (Don Prather), is no doubt grateful.

Sepesy is very adept at controlling the theatrical elements of The Douglas Tree to layer meaning and effect and force the audience to sort things out: one of the more interesting examples being the use of the daughter and her boyfriend as representations of the younger Dougie and Cass. Perhaps the most stunning moment occurs when the older Dougie (Branstein) walks into the wood to show his daughter (Konchan) the heart he long-ago carved into a tree for Cass: at this moment Branstein opens his shirt and becomes the tree (the heart carved presumably in his chest); at that singular moment the young couple comes to life before our eyes: the young lovers Konchan and Kosmatka—acting out that long ago time. The doubling of the younger actors as both the older Dougie and Cass as well as the current Rose and Marc creates a Bahktinian dialog in terms of the temporal and physical space as well as between the actors and the audience adding the “layers” of meaning I mentioned earlier—and with great success. One of the more brutal moments of the play comes when Dougie “cuts” the heart off the tree using an axe and we see the representation of the young Dougie being axed to death—a scene that takes on the dual meaning of Dougie’s no-doubt strong desire to axe his daughter’s boyfriend Marc. The meaning of this moment is confounded for the audience by two points: Marc never returns to the stage and the absurdist technique of having Dougie go about the stage for the rest of the play wearing a blood-drenched shirt—that no one seems to notice or comment on.

I will save a later post to talk about The Alice Seed, but will here just remark on the obvious “nature” theme running through the titles: seed, tree. I will also note that the two plays draw heavily on family tragedy, absence, loss, and memory—and that Sepesy uses very strong stage images and uses them to create an enchanted environment on the stage that has a heart-wrenching pulse.

Theatre Games

Michael Wright in his book [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically[/amazon_link] begins chapter two by outlining the concept of theatre games for playwrights.

Wright outlines the approach to playwriting that he rejects:

Doctrinaire statements include saying, the conflict must begin by page 5, or that exposition has to be done in such and such a way. Nontheatrical statements are suggesting that you develop plots from outlines or work up characters from lists of traits such as hair color, politics, and choice of bath soap.

Instead, [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ] Wright[/amazon_link] advocates, per the first sentence, the use of “theatre games; activities that encourage creative and dynamic thinking, playful writing, and immersive engagement in the process of creating scenes, characters, text, dialogue, and, of course, subtext.

Wright mentions a couple of sources for the games that he advocates. The first is Viola Spolin‘s theatre games and improvisations. Wright comments that her theatre games showed him “how to work from a ‘doing approach’ finding a given scene through active discovery”rather than a detached mental process.’ The second source for [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Wright[/amazon_link] came from his work with Harold Clurman in the Director’s Unit, which was a subdivision of Israel Horovitz‘s Playwright’s Unit at the Actors Studio. [amazon_link id=”1557831327″ target=”_blank” ]Clurman[/amazon_link] apparently used a process whereby a group of playwrights began creating new plays all at the same time with a set number of pages to create per week and then these plays were workshopped, i.e. shared, read, critiqued, discussed, etc. This is very like the process I’ve gone through in several of my playwriting classes at CSU/NEOMFA. For several reasons, [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Wright[/amazon_link] and another playwright, [amazon_link id=”0435086294″ target=”_blank” ]Jeffrey Sweet[/amazon_link], left this group and created their own named the New York Writer’s Bloc. Out of this came an exercise described by Wright as the “Six Line”.

The six-line as a writing exercise is a short scene literally comprised of six lines between two characters with each character having three lines. A line can be one word or five pages and is the sum of one character’s thoughts as spoken in that one response Each week’s six-lines were based on a given topic, which was also known as ‘negotiation.’ A negotiation was defined as the matter, issue, or problem between two people who each wanted a different result and automatically led to conflict The use of an assigned negotiation helped us all because we didn’t have to think of a topic on our own

Wright asserts that writing negotiations is the “center of all theatrical writing” because it encompasses the “show don’t’ tell” writing principle (mentioned in my earlier posts) and creates characters who define meaning by both what they say and what they do that is, not only the action, but how that action is carried out. More importantly, by creating meaning in this way, the audience is forced to pay attention to all aspects of a theatrical production, not just the words that characters speakbecause the words a character speaks can be in sharp contracts with the actions that character performs: the sum of these elements adding up to a complexity and depth of meaning that is much greater than their component pieces alone.

Here is an example from Wright’s book:

#1 A Couple playing Scrabble

KAREN: There. L-O-V-E. That’s, mm, double letter. Fifteen.
HARRY: OK, and I’ll just borrow that L, and add my U, S, T. That’s triple word, forty-five!
KAREN: Fine! I’ll add my F, U, and L up here. That’s now Faithful, and that scores me thirty-six, so I’m still up by fifty.
HARRY: Yeah? Well, here’s one for you in front of your ART, I drop a P, then finish with a Y. Double-word, triple on the Y, and we’re talking seventy-eight points. Now who’s “up”?
KAREN: Yeah, we’ll see. Here, try this: in front of your ANT I’m going to add P, R, E, G, N. [A beat; she gives him a very long look.] Your move. [Beat.] Well?
HARRY: I’m thinking! [Beat.] I’m thinking.

First, going back to the quote I added to one of my earlier posts from Bob McKee’s book, Story: namely, that if the characters in your scene are talking about what they’re talking about: you’re fucked. The point being, in this case, that Karen and Harry aren’t talking about scrabble. They aren’t directly talking about what they’re talking about. It is carried behind the text, or under the text, or is to the text as the spirit is to the body: out there floating, ethereal.

Second, part of the theatricality of this scene lies a) in the fact that they are doing something physical: in time, space, etc; and b) the thing that they are doing they are doing aloud and, while they are literally spelling everything out for the audience, the audience still has to add everything up to get the meaning and what is implied by the activities of the two.

Third, the scene builds tension. The first exchange sets the pattern and the relationship; the second ups the stakes in way Karen and Harry relate within their society; the final exchange raises the ‘game’ to a whole new levelone that ‘check mates’ the other and removes the relationship from the world of college parties to the world of child-rearing, parenting, and adulthood.

Fourth, the words each speaks, the location of the exclamation points (their enthusiasm), their sense of humor, sense of irony, snideness, revelation of interests and what is important to themall of this ‘dialogue’ and ‘behavior’ reveals characterbut it is revealed only in discerning it actively, not by having it told explicitly.

Regardless, this, as [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Wright[/amazon_link] admits, is only an exercise, but this could easily be a way of developing a dramatic moment in a play that you are already writingthis play is about Karen and Harry and you need a way of showing the dramatic revelation of her pregnancythis certainly would be a more engaging way of doing it than find some argument or reason to logically wind them up and have Karen blurt it out to silence all things that could be said after it, etc.

In the podcast I did for Jonah’s Theatrically Speaking show I mentioned the exercise that Mike Geither distributed which led to the play that will have a reading next week at Cleveland Public Theatre. That exercise runs as follows:

Five to fifteen pages.
The speaker from the monologue you created tonight is involved in a two character scene. All of the following must occur:

One character has a secret.
A musical instrument is heard or played.
One character has a nickname.
There is a kiss.
One person sings.
For at least ten lines, they must communicate with single, one-syllable words.
A secret is revealed.
One character makes a paper airplane.
Something spills.
Something must be sold.
A history is recounted.
Someone prays.
Someone rubs his/her/its hands together.
One character touches the other’s face.
At the very end of the scene, a third character enters.

Very like poetry in meter or within a rhymed system, the act of constraining your writing and forcing yourself, technically, to do certain things sparks creativityit demands inventive solutions to rules that, in this case, you must abide or meet. But more, this approach to writing forces you to think about possibilities you never would normally consider. I, for instance, never would have a character pray. It is not because I am opposed to prayer. It is because, while I prayed throughout my childhood like a good little boy, I rarely do now. So in this regard, how does having a character pray connect me with the character? What dormant emotions, images, longings, and connections from my childhood are stirred uplike sediment on a river bottom? What does this bring to my writing? What does that bring to my characters? How does this deepen them, strengthen themand what does it do for my writing as a whole?

As [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ] Wright[/amazon_link] remarks:

“This active process allows the writer to explore the play, the characters, events prior to or following the play, and so onall in a very theatrical way because the exploration itself is through playwriting.

Follow-up

I just was reading Intermission’s site again and she has done something cool, she uses a box that “displays qualities about the character or meaningful aspects of the play,” but this time she’s used a mask. That is supercool. But beyond this, she notes that she uses a collage to think about her characters and the play and that kind of approach has to create some really original insights and develop powerful connections between characters, events, attributes, etc.