Talenthouse

Talents not yet specified

Location United States, New York, New York

Bio I have been writing and producing my plays in New York City for eleven years now. My last three full-length plays, Viral, Universal Robots, and Hail Satan have all had successful runs at downtown theaters, and Viral was extended this month into the Fringe Encore Series.

One thing I always tell writers is, “Write short plays.” Writing short plays – and I mean five- and ten-minute plays, not one-acts – makes you so much better at writing full-lengths. It’s your crash course in making every second count.
If you have all the time in the world to write a short play, you can hone it and revise it, and that’s certainly a useful process. But even better is writing short plays under the circumstances of the 24-Hour Plays process. I’ve written for the 24-Hour Plays twice and co-wrote for the 24-Hour Musicals once, and I can tell you the most valuable things I learned when there wasn’t time to refine:

1. You must make a strong choice and commit to it.
2. You must write for the actors you have been assigned.
3. You must write for the room in which the plays will be performed.

This gets you, as a writer, back to the elemental nature of both creativity and theater. You have to trust your initial impulse, as strange as it may be, and dig into it wholeheartedly. And you have to work with the basic tools in front of you – performers and a space, both with very specific qualities – to make a new piece of theater.

The first time I wrote for the 24-Hour Plays I panicked on writing night and drew on an idea I’d had in my head for a while. This is a mistake. I wrote a play that was packed with a backlog of ideas going back months, which a lot of hard-to-memorize monologues and cross-talk that wasn’t necessarily a comfortable fit for the (very talented) actors I was assigned.

When I wrote for them again, eight years later, I went in more confident that if I kept my head clear and forged a simple idea inspired by the performers themselves and the space, I would do better. And in my view I was right; the piece was clearer, sharper, and more impactful.

But it could still have been better. It’s three years later now, and I’ve learned a lot more about playwriting in that time. I’d like a shot – in collaboration with superior theater artists who would force me to raise my game – to nail it.

You might take a year or more to write a full-length play, and while all that time is nice for gently nurturing the idea, the challenge for me is to hold on to the clarity of the original raw idea throughout that process – and to hold on to the ethic of making every second count, even when you have two hours instead of five minutes.

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