Everyone has apprentice plays. Most people don’t know Eugene O’Neill and
Tennessee Williams wrote dozens of plays (rarely performed now) before their first real successes with Beyond the Horizon and The Glass Menagerie, respectively. My output from age eleven to nineteen consisted of a few blackout sketches/monologues, six or seven complete short plays, and three full-length plays that burgeoned on success and helped make me the writer I am, though I would never show any of them to you, of course.
At eleven, I was accepted as a Theatre Arts major at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) in Birmingham, which I had always thought was some private college, but turned out to be a public middle and senior high school for people like me—those who would’ve been beaten up in public schools. I suppose it is known now for the school that produced the author of The Hunger Games (another Theatre major).
The moment I was handed the little Samuel French acting edition of Jean Giraudoux’ Intermezzo (in America, known as The Enchanted), I was mesmerized by even the type in the little booklet. Being an acting edition, it gave no indication of how a play should look in manuscript style, but it didn’t matter: the italics of the stage directions, the gorgeous language in English translation from French (by Maurice Valency)—it all turned a budding actor into a budding writer.
My first attempt at dramatic writing (technically) was a screenplay. I was born, of course, the year Star Wars, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi came out, so I was a movie buff before I fell in love with the dust of theatre curtains. The script, which I
typed with two fingers on an old typewriter my Father gave me, was essentially a version of The Muppet Movie as, if it had been filmed, it would have featured all my puppets. I used the twin girls down the street whom I hated as the villains and planned to shoot it with my elementary school friends. Sadly, Out of this World, a comedy mostly set in Outer Space, never got greenlit.
My first attempt at playwriting was a collaboration. An older student helped me over the phone pen my first opus—a roughly twelve page two-act play entitled (forgive me) To Eric(a) is Human. This was a lame attempt at getting even with a student I hated but my collaborator loved a boy named Eric and I was trying to impress an Erica.
I have no idea the contents of this handwritten piece (odd that it was handwritten because I typed my screenplay so I wouldn’t have to decipher my own MD-like handwriting) and it is the only work of mine that I destroyed, doing this once I discovered the intended Erica for whom it was written didn’t care much for it. In the words of David Ives, “Probably my best work.”
I stuck to writing three-page sketches for the next couple of years, rarely showing them to anyone. A sketch about a New Year’s Eve party called “The Bathroom” was reworked into a twelve-page (what was it about that length?) one-act called Resolutions...Elsewhere, a title so good I pillaged it later for a much better play I wrote as part of the short play cycle Youth and Age (2013) and have rewritten since.
My “career” as a playwright (such as it was/is) began with a fully-fledged (but still bad) play I wrote on March 28, 1997. While most of my friends in my prepubescent life were girls, this changed rather quickly when my overly emotional libido and sexually repressed upbringing caused a bipolar zonk that made me abscond all female friends for male ones. But Last Call had a sympathetic female protagonist. A good deal of my plays do—it comes from being raised by very strong women.
Although everyone at ASFA was pretty much Southern, we did not identify with the South and tried to escape it every chance we got. We were wannabe New Yorkers and Angelenos. The setting of Last Call was LAX and had decidedly WASPish characters who are about to fly on their honeymoon. I don’t recall the plot machination that revealed the husband was already a serial cheater (and I certainly don’t understand how he snuck a gun past security even in a pre-9/11 world), but the play was given a concert reading at the very first student-run coffee house night we hosted at ASFA. The playwright (who also played one of the stuffy parents) was born. I introduced the play by randomly dedicating it to a rival and the girlfriend he recently broke up with. That caused more of a stir than the play, but the applause was something from which I never recovered.
In the summer of 1998, in between school semesters, I took on two community theatre roles. I hardly ever did work outside ASFA because we were low
on men, and I was usually exhausted by the summer (I played eighteen roles before I was eighteen). The combination of being in Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream unconsciously brewed in me a short play with music called Life’s Labor’s Love. Filled with terrible puns, I also forget most of the content except for the stichomythic Seinfeld-type dialogue I was shooting for. At that time, no writer of comedy was not influenced by Seinfeld and no budding playwright wasn’t influenced by David Mamet, so the back-and-forth of the main characters in the bar-and-grill setting showed off my facility for two things most young playwrights don’t have: a sense of stage time (quite different from real time) and rhythm. As a percussionist, that last facet makes sense.
The play was not performed at the coffee house night for two years because I had other things going on. When it was produced, it was the first production I decided to give over entirely to other people to stage. Our Black Box studio space had room for you to stand under the raised seating and there I stood, writhing in pain as my words were mumbled, jumbled, and largely improvised by a cast that was embarrassed by the juvenilia. It caused me to resent actors for many years. I trusted no one—not even other directors I liked—with my material in the heady days after.
My secondary school magnum opus was another Seinfeld parody with the simplest set-up in the world: two guys at a bar discussing women. It was divided into twenty blackout scenes where honest questions about the opposite sex (which were
intensely juvenile for characters who were supposed to be in their ‘20s—I was fifteen after all) would be lobbed back and forth. But it also introduced a theme in my work still present today. Half-way through the play, the pair decide to take a trip out of the bar to experience life instead of talking about it. The result is disastrous and there they remain back at the bar at the end of the show and invent a deliberately wrong interpretation of the title Hopeless Romantics—not seduced and abandoned lovers, but romantic people who are totally hopeless at life.
The first production was a staged reading. The women in the audience, offended by the curt cuts I was secretly lobbing at them threw fruit and shoes on the stage. It was a miraculous night. It was also the first one of my plays seen by an adult—my acting teacher Elizabeth Adkisson—who started taking my interest in playwriting seriously. With her help, I submitted it to Southern PlayWorks, the only Birmingham company devoted to producing new work (sadly gone now) and they oversaw presenting the Apsey Award. I was given it by a freelance playwright who had won the award himself for his most successful play Holmes and Watson. Lee Eric Shackleford had been a story writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation and, while being Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), he has become a very successful writer of radio drama.
Shackleford (“Shack”), I assume, was impressed by the facile, precocious nature of the writing. The award offered money, a certificate made out to someone called “Ryan S. Tittle,” and a concert reading.
My next effort was, for all intents and purposes, my first serious work. Though short, and only written because I stared at a book on my desk called Christopher Durang: 27 One-Act Plays and thought, “I’ve got to write more plays,” A Plumber’s Story was a fairly sophisticated idea for a drama by a teenager.
Set in a cyclical world where a plumber teaches his young apprentice the basics of plumbing and the basics of life only to die of a heart attack and in the final scene, the student has become the master and the dialogue starts over again for a new apprentice, much like the ending scene of La Cantatrice Chauve. In the end, I think it was an unconscious attempt to write about the cyclical nature of blue-collar work and my fear I would end up a salesman like my father, to whom it was partly dedicated.
This was followed by another short comedy initially entitled A Short-Handed Affair. It was a request from a friend who was coming up on his senior-directed one-act and was interested in directing my work, giving me the opportunity to have two of my short plays in the season of my junior year. A Plumber’s Story was short, so it needed a companion piece to make a full evening. The idea behind the romantic comedy was two young twenty-somethings (who wants to produce a play about teenagers? I was one and didn’t even understand what the word teenager meant) who experiment in a pre-internet dating service where they keep detailed notes of negative thoughts during their dates and share them nakedly, eventually abandoning them in favor of accepting their faults as they fall for each other. As Elizabeth felt the word “affair” implied a sexual triste, I took the new title from Extreme’s pop hit “More Than Words.”
Unfortunately for me, I was not allowed in the rehearsal process of the productions of A Plumber’s Story and More Than Words. When I sat down at the premiere to view them, Story was played very straight with little or no changes and had a beautiful, kinetic set. More Than Words turned out to be more like Life’s Labor’s Love. What was a ten-minute romantic comedy became a mostly improvised piece that reminds one of a bad Ben Stiller rom-com (as if there were another kind). I can even remember an improvised scene where the male character offered to cook dinner, which turned out to be Hot Pockets that he burnt. I was mortified.
While Elizabeth was certain Story was the superior effort, our Equity Actor- in-Residence Instructor and Theatre Arts Chairperson felt Story weak and Words strong based strictly on the familiarity of its naturalism and the laughs, most of which were invented by the director and his cast.
I sent the original version of More Than Words to the Young Playwrights Festival at the Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, where we were all named finalists. The previous production, however, had embarrassed me so much, I rewrote it to be more of a dramedy (a kind of Same Time, Next Year) and I brought the new draft with me to Atlanta, where it was accepted for a concert reading. While there, we also had to write a ten-minute play and mine was a Shakespeare parody called The Two Noble Playwrights (I forget the plot—I think Mamet was a character). Anyway, the new More Than Words was received politely with the only feedback from the strung- out, drug-addled teenage playwrights, “I get what you’re trying to say.” Not exactly the kind of review you bank on.
This was now 2000 and “Shack” had a novel idea. A close friend of mine had begun writing plays. “Shack” read my new version of Words and he dreamed up an evening of one-acts (two of mine, two of the friend’s) for what would be Southern PlayWorks’ final season called Four Blinks ofthe Eye. They would be linked by a wistful song of youth for which “Shack” wrote the lyrics and his father composed the music. This was my first professional foray into the business. We would be paid professional royalties and the cast would be Birmingham talent and the show would be performed at the Library Theatre at the Hoover Public Library.
Stretched too thin as producer, designer, and director, “Shack” let my friend and I do our jobs the way we wished. At that point, I had been burned too many times by improvising actors and I refused to let any changes—not a word—be touched in either script, though I did end up writing a new scene for Romantics.
The cast for Romantics was perfect though the actors still struggled with the adolescent mindset of their adult characters. The cast for Words, despite the actress who played the creator of the dating service, was less than stellar (let’s just say audiences “got what I was trying to say” again). The other playwright, my friend R. Daniel Walker, made changes left and right, sometimes cutting and hacking his pieces in ways I could never dream even now! His drama landed, his farce was a disaster people still enjoyed (farce is hard). Still, we landed interviews in the now much-missed Birmingham Post-Herald and got nifty checks, part of which we used to celebrate with a dinner at Waffle House.
I had one more short play in me during high school—a 2001 play about an interracial marriage entitled Call Waiting. While never performed, I submitted it to the Young Southern Writer’s Project at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and received an Honorable Mention (one dramaturg told me, if it had been her, my piece would have won). A Plumber’s Story even received a Judges’ Special Recognition at the Alabama Writers’ Forum’s Literary Arts Awards, courtesy of Elizabeth and my creative writing teacher Michael Florence, a gem of a human being. But that elusive full-length play was still hovering over me.
By the end of my junior year, I was comfortable enough with Elizabeth to chat about possible shows for us to do. She had come across a very old Russian comedy called Nedorsl (The Minor) by Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin. It is both a view of country life in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great and a play about education and ignorance. She offered for me to write a full-length version of it (the dialogue and
the action—she would adapt the story and create the character names) for my senior project, which was news to my ears because I had no interest in directing a one-act. Plus, it would be the mainstage show for my senior year and would include student set, costume, and lighting design.
She gave me two time periods from which to choose for the adaptation— 1850s France and the future. I chose the latter not because I was a fan of science fiction, but because the idea of writing dialogue for a nineteenth century French costume drama made me ill. Besides, I would not write science fiction, but a futuristic comedy. I accepted. Over the Summer and early Fall, a mammoth manuscript emerged where I tried to keep all Fonvizin’s subplots and even some of his dialogue. The first reading in class was given a tepid response—one young actress said we could not pull it off. But Elizabeth and I could not be dissuaded. It was fun stepping in another writer’s shoes to discover why he made the choices he made. I have loved adaptation ever since.
Discordia ended up being the most expensive production in ASFA’s history if, for no other reason, that it had two suspended fifty-inch television monitors flanking the stage. As rehearsals progressed, Elizabeth began inserting little bits of interstitial dialogue to help cover scene changes, tramping on my turf just a bit, but I had learned not to sweat the small stuff. After all, I had to do rewrites all night, memorize my
own lines, and then listen to the actors complain about the material backstage every day for two months. Somehow, we pulled it off—we always did. The costumes and set were amazing. The script, neither mine nor Fonvizin’s, could be performed today. It is simply too out-of-fashion. But we were tickled to send a copy to the Library of Congress.
College, of course, loomed large. As a junior, I had applied early decision to Bennington College, the famously progressive liberal arts college where Helen Frankenthaler invented abstract expressionism, Martha Graham invented modern dance, and Bret Easton Ellis graduated as a New York Times best-selling author. It was the third figure that grabbed my attention, of course. I had grown tired of acting and was trying my hand at being a person-of-letters. Through Michael, I started writing (unbelievably bad) poetry, intellectually interesting but clunky short stories, and even an outline for a novel.
So, off I went to Bennington to be a “writer.” But a mistake in my class selection (there is no core curriculum offered there), put me back in theatre courses and, since auditioning for and acting in plays was the only way I knew to have a social life, I acted for two more years. But I also had my first professional playwriting teacher.
Gladden Schrock was the first Playwright-in-Residence at the Yale School of Drama and a founding member of the Playwrights Unit of the Long Wharf Theatre, created by his Yale roommate Jon Jory. His novel Letters from Alf had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but as finalists were not announced at that time—and don't get the prize money—he
spent years as a commercial herring fisherman in Maine and taught playwriting in colleges, founding the Drama department at Manchester College.
His first reaction to things like Hopeless Romantics and whatever other piffle I gave him was, “You’re very facile” (I had to look up the word), “but you’ve never written one real character in your life.” I dutifully marched to the library every Sunday where the only copy of George Pierce Baker’s Dramatic Technique was held and could not be loaned. He would have me read hundreds of pages at a time—I think he hoped to wean me out of his class. But it didn’t work. Gladden’s prodding only made me even more keen to impress, but he hated people trying to impress him. This is a man who, after all, was taught playwriting by John Gassner, the great anthologizer of American drama and Gassner was taught by Baker himself, the first person to teach playwriting! It took two years for Gladden to warm to me and that was probably helped tremendously by spending two Winter terms as a personal intern for David Henry Hwang in New York City.
David had been my favorite playwright for as long as I had been reading plays. The way he melded Broadway-style comedy and Asian theatre techniques and yet told such universal stories was inspiring. So was his dexterity—he’s written teleplays, screenplays, song lyrics, musical libretti, texts for dance pieces, and he’s the world’s most performed living opera librettist. He made a name for himself with the Obie Award-winning FOB in his early 20s (I wanted to be a success at that age too, but alas!) and followed this years later by being the first Asian-American to win the Tony Award for Best Play for the international success M. Butterfly, which also won the Gassner Award, the Drama Desk Award, and was a Pulitzer finalist. But David
was much more than M. Butterfly. His daring work continued with the Obie Award- winners Golden Child and Yellow Face and the libretto revision for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. He was taught by Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes, the latter largely considered one of the great playwriting teachers in the world. So, I had quite the legacy from both my teacher and my mentor.
It was under David’s tutelage in 2002 when I wrote my first play set in the South. I had never considered myself Southern until I moved away and realized how differently I thought from most other people. The short play was called She’s Standing Behind Me and it is my first piece of mature work. But, its newness, its Southerness—everything about it—made me hide it from Gladden for two years. I don’t know why. Sometimes, something happens in you that’s so new and personal, you feel you must keep it a secret. At any rate, the first staged reading of it at Bennington gave me hope that all my work till then had not been done in vain.
Still, two more pieces of juvenilia followed. The other play I started with David was not unlike M. Butterfly or Amadeus in that it is largely a monologue delivered to (in this case) a conjured audience. The story involved Greg who, as a student teacher, had been falsely accused of inappropriate behavior with a female student. His life over before it has even begun (another recurring theme in my later work), he takes to his room where he finds solace in watching video tape after video tape (this was 2002) of episodes of The Brady Bunch, in particular the ones involving Marcia Brady. Not only does she remind him of the student who accused him, but she reminds him of a long-lost childhood romance. He lectures the audience on the brilliance of the Bradys, running through every series incarnation and how it is the
only world in which in just twenty-two minutes, everything turns out alright. He is frequently visited by his psychologist brother, who is trying to lure him out of his room that is covered in Brady memorabilia (and who we see in flashback playing with his kid brother at ages eight and ten).
Somehow, Greg got it in his mind that Marcia herself would appear and save him from this life. In the eleven drafts of the script (hint: if you’re ever past seven drafts, you have no idea what kind of play you want to write), she eventually never comes, and Greg is slowly coaxed into reality. But what always made the material work was the lecture on Brady-living (which was funny and touching every time it was done in private, concert, and staged readings).
One day, in an effort to solve the play, Gladden told me to read Peter Shaffer’s Equus. It was a devastating experience. First, because it is one of the finest commercial plays I’ve ever read. And, secondly, because I realized Shaffer had already written the play I wanted to write. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia was an interesting experiment and for naught.
By 2003, I had a collaborator who had inspired many plays. We met performing in a workshop of the first act of an exciting student-written musical about the Matawan shark attacks in New Jersey (and, yes, it worked!). The following year, she was to give her senior voice recital. We decided we wanted to perform together and, either by force or by kismet, she happened to also have passion for my personal Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim.
The idea was to do a totally illegal musical revue of his work (in the vein of Side by Side by Sondheim, et. al.). It was to be called Not a Day Goes By. I would write
the continuity (the story and sketches that move the piece from song to song), but I wanted to do it in such a way that it would tell a genuinely interesting and moving story. The story concerned two formerly married cabaret performers George and Fay (named after the hero of Sunday in the Park with George and the heroine of Anyone Can Whistle) who meet at a party and reminisce in flashback over their up-and-down romance and career, which almost killed their love entirely. A rueful, bittersweet show, the staged reading included songs from every Sondheim show written to that time, including “Good Thing Going” from Merrily We Roll Along, “It Takes Two” from Into the Woods, “Loving You” from Passion, and so on.
It turned out, though, the continuity worked just fine on its own. I rewrote it, added some material and public domain songs, and called it As the Days Go By. Cheeky, old-style Broadway material, Gladden figured I had tossed it off in a weekend and was dismayed when I told him it took time. To my surprise, though, it was a semi-finalist for the Mildred and Albert Panowski Award from Northern Michigan University.
And so ends the apprentice plays that brought me to the playwright I am today. What to learn from them? Not much, I suppose. Sam Shepard once pithily wrote his first plays seemed like they were written by another person. And they were, as were mine, though I think mine were a little better. Sorry, Sam. Grimace in peace.
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