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Theater
Theater Talkback: A Time
Talkback: and
A Ti m ae Place
and atoPl
Experiment
ace to Experim ent
July
By Sarah20,
Ruhl 2012 by Sarah Ruhl

July 20,2012 1:41pm

During the summer, ArtsBeat is inviting members of the theater world to contribute to the weekly Theater Talkback column, alternating
with the critics Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood. So far, Trav S. D., a historian of vaudeville, talked about the long bare-knuckles history
shared between the boxing ring and the stage, and Alexis Soloski, a critic and theater professor, highlighted unforgettable stage entrances.
This week the playwright Sarah Ruhl, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, explains why critics are not being invited to review her Melancholy Play.

One benefit of participating in 13P, the playwrights collective that started in 2003, is the chance to serve as artistic director for your own
play. For my long-awaited slot, the 13th and last of the set, I wanted a singular event, the kind that I wouldnt be allowed to have at a regular
institutional theater. I wanted the production to feel like an offering to the audience, and a celebration of 13P (Mission statement: We dont
develop plays. We do them), rather than like a traditional run of a play.

I explain this to give context for 13Ps decision not to open our production, Melancholy Play, for review.

Ive chosen to do an older play (and lets be honest, a weird play) that has never been done in New York. I gave Melancholy Play to
composer Todd Almond and asked him if he heard more music in it, and he said: yes, he heard it almost sung through with a string quartet and
a piano. I said: great! Lets do it at 13P. So we embarked on a brand new musical with absolutely no infrastructure for development, no funding
for music or microphones.

It was a grand experiment. We sat in my apartment and worked together and stared at each other. I made rewrites. Todd wrote an entire
score with no musicians to help him hear the thing. We needed volunteer accompanists for auditions. We needed a string quartet. I called my
daughters violin teacher to see if shed play violin for free. She agreed to help us find a quartet that would be proficient but reasonably priced.
The Drama Book Shop donated us their basement for a week so we could hear the music for the first time. Steinway donated us a piano for the
run but we have to pay for the tuning.

At a point we received some enhancement money from True Love productions so that we could afford to pay the musicians and so we could
afford some microphones to hang on the ceiling, so that we could hear the singers in a large loft space. I have loved having this connection with
the nitty-gritty means of production. But it is an unorthodox way to build a new musical.

All 13P staff are volunteers. No one is paid. The organization is run essentially by volunteers having coffee once a week between 8:30 and
9:30 a.m., after which they go to their regular jobs at institutional theaters with real estate, offices, and the like. The budget that 13Ps
playwrights get is now $50,000, up from the budget of $28,000 when we began. (A more standard budget for a new Off Broadway musical
would range from half a million dollars to roughly upward of a million dollars.)

The reason the run of Melancholy Play is so short (11 performances) is that we couldnt afford to pay rent for a space and a string quartet
for a longer run. This means no previews in a traditional sense; no time for the composer and writer to tweak the new creation after hearing it
live in front of an audience.

We will hear the piece one or two times with a full string quartet, and then offer it to the audience. It didnt feel fair to me to burden the
production team with the pressure of reviews when we were already embarking on something so insanely ambitious given our resources. (Lucy
Thurber did the same for her 13P production of Monstrosity.)

I was also interested in 13Ps effort to redefine success for the playwright: success, in this case, I think, is simply getting the play up.
Heaving it up, throwing it up, seeing the thing, rather than trying to perfect it with months of development or previews. I felt like closing the
play to reviews was in that spirit of simply seeing what the thing was and offering it up with some good will to the audience. I wanted to redirect
the emphasis toward the fun of the process (which in this case was some strange combination of a scavenger hunt and a rigorous musical boot
camp).

I am no scientist, but I think of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, whereby the viewer changes the actual molecules of the event. In this
case, I didnt want the gaze of the reviewers, or the anticipation of the gaze, to change the event before wed figured out what the aesthetic
object was. Normally I might do that out of town. Historically I might have done that in Peoria. But because I was excited to be part of 13P, and
excited to walk to work, and excited to bring my 6-year-old with me to rehearsals, Im doing that in Brooklyn.

I believe passionately in a free press, and should reviewers ultimately choose to buy a ticket, I will welcome you to the theater, as I am
enthusiastic about living in a democracy with a vibrant free press. I have no wish at all to be adversarial. But I did want to provide some context
for why we did not actively invite press to this particular event from the outset, and for why it feels awkward to everyone involved to change
course halfway through. I suspect that there is a paradox for artists with regard to their relationship with the press: the press desires more
bravery from artists, and yet in their very calls for bravery, end up at times eliciting timidity because of artists fear of public opinion. It is this
messy cycle that makes our artistic life and our democracy great.

But at times as a writer one has the impulse to exist outside that cycle and burrow; to burrow in the dark, or in Brooklyn, and make
something quiet and simple, and offer it without any fanfare to the audience.

How can this happen? And, if so, what effect would that have on the work itself and on the audiences?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/theater-talkback-a-time-and-a-place-to-experiment/ 2015-01-17