[Below are several more script and reading reports from my years as a script-reader. The first three evaluations are from the Rockefeller Foundation grant competition which was featured in “More Script Reports I” (24 November); the last two are from two of the theaters for which I evaluated scripts.
[The first of those two is a report for the StageArts Theater Company, an Off-Off-Broadway showcase house for whom I was asked to set up a play-soliciting, -reading, and -evaluating system to help the co-artistic directors find suitable properties to advance their production goals.
[The last eval in this collection is from Theatre Junction, an incipient theater company in the earliest stages of being formed by my NYU production dramaturgy teacher, C. Lee (Cynthia) Jenner. (Cynthia was also president of LMDA, the dramaturgs’ organization that administered the RF reading project on which I served.) If I continue to post these script evaluations, you will hear more about these two companies, and I’ll say more below as I introduce the reports.]
--------------------
[George C. Wolfe (b. 1954)
is a stage and film director and a playwright. From 1993 until 2004, he was artistic
director of New York City’s Public Theater (known until 2002 as the New York
Shakespeare Festival.
[Over his career, Wolfe has won and been nominated for almost all the awards one can get in New York City theater: Tonys, Obies, Drama Desks, Lucille Lortels, Outer Critics, and many others. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame (see my post on 10 February 2020) in 2013.
[The Colored Museum premiered at Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in April 1986, directed by L. Kenneth Richardson (an MFA classmate of mine at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts). In November, it opened at the Public Theater’s Susan Stein Shiva Theater in Manhattan’s East Village and later opened at the Royal Court Theater in London, England, in July 1987.
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIPS FOR AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS PROGRAM
1987 COMPETITION
PRE-SCREENING
SCRIPT EVALUATION
READER: [Rick]
DATE: 10/4/86
AUTHOR/(TRANS.): George C. Wolfe
TITLE/DATE: The Colored Museum, 1985
GENRE/STYLE: satirical revue
STRUCTURE: 12 revue sketches/blackouts; no intermission
SETTING: “white walls, track lighting. A starkness befitting a museum . . . . It is suggested that a revolve be used . . . .”
LANGUAGE: mixed, w/poetry, prose monologues, songs, dialogue, even a take on Black English
MUSIC/LYRICS: several songs, but the music was not supplied; lyrics seem mildly clever, but may perform better than they read
NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: ensemble of 2 men and 3 women, all black
CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: send-ups of stereotypes of American blacks through history; sketchily drawn, 1-dimensional (as in most revues)
CONCEPTION: a satirical exploration of “the myths and madness of colored people” in America
CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: revue style; subject matter; exposing the painful truth beneath the satire
BRIEF SYNOPSIS:
___________________________________________________________
In 12 sketches, including several monologues/1-character scenes, several song pieces and several dialogue pieces, Wolfe explores the stereotypes of black Americans from slave days to the present. He deals not only with the stereotypes imposed on blacks by whites, but those subscribed to by blacks themselves as well. Most are comic, but several are painfully sad. Included are a black “stewardess” on a slave ship bound for Savannah, a parody of Raisin in the Sun, a strange piece with arguing wigs (an “afro” vs. a “process”), and a dark piece about a dead soldier who returns to the battlefield to kill his comrades to spare them the pain in their future after the war.
DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:
This work is hard to judge. It reads a
little like a hip, black Feiffer’s People, and the songs, which are
important to the piece, are impossible to judge from just the lyrics. However, I have a strong feeling that the
material will play much better than it reads.
Revues don’t generally read well, I don’t think. Furthermore, there is an important
sensitivity evident in the pieces. They
are carefully constructed, and each demonstrates a unique, even strange,
vision. Wolfe has not just assembled
some black (in both senses of the word) humor—he’s saying something, the way
Brecht did. (Brecht wasn’t this glib,
certainly.) The odd humor makes you sit
up and take notice of what’s underneath, and it makes you think about what’s
going on on stage. This is not a
superficial work, though a difficult one.
Not all of it works.
The question is whether Wolfe is suitable for a large residency grant on the basis of this work. He’s certainly ambitious, but is he really a “mid-career” writer? He’s had some successes recently, but he’s not been around all that long yet, and I suspect he’s got some growing to do before he can truly be considered in his mid-career. I would have liked to have seen a more integrated play as a basis for this evaluation.
RECOMMENDATION:
Reject ____________
Reject, but express
interest in writer ____XXX____
Second reading ____________
Other ____________
* *
* *
[Robert Patrick (b. 1937) is a playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, and novelist. He was the most prolific dramatist of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway scene in Greenwich Village (see my posts “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018).
[Over his career, he’s written and published over 60 plays and has had over 300 productions of his works. Working mostly in the OOB and gay theater milieu, Patrick’s most mainstream success was the 1975 Broadway production of Kennedy’s Children, which garnered a 1976 nomination for the Outstanding New Play Drama Desk Award.
[“Hello Bob,” an account of Patrick’s experiences with the production of Kennedy’s Children was produced at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1990; my review of that show is posted on Rick On Theater on 19 April 2021 as part of “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive.”
[The Trial of Socrates was staged in New York at the Wings Theatre on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in 1986, and in 1988, it became the first gay play presented by the City of New York.]
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIPS FOR AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS PROGRAM
1987 COMPETITION
SCRIPT EVALUATION
READER: [Rick]
DATE: 10/4/86
AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Robert Patrick
TITLE/DATE: The Trial of Socrates, 1986
GENRE/STYLE: classical drama
STRUCTURE: 2 acts
SETTING: terrace of ancient Athenian house; realistic or semi-realistic
LANGUAGE: verse; pretentious
MUSIC/LYRICS: none
NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 4 men + “chorus of elders”
CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: quasi-historical w/symbolic overtones
CONCEPTION: Patrick’s: exploring the real reason Socrates was tried and condemned; mine: what happens when you deny a kid a homosexual affair
CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: (phony) Greek classic style; gay theme
BRIEF SYNOPSIS:
__________________________________________________________
All he old men of Athens lust after young Alkibiades, but he spurns them all. He has invited Socrates, the best man in Athens, to dinner, and sets the scene by getting rid of all the servants. The old men all gather and spy on him from the bushes, hoping to see some real action. Socrates disappoints them all, including Alkibiades, by resisting his advances. Alkibiades goes on a rampage, ultimately destroying the household idols of Athens and leading the city into an unwanted war. All this is blamed on Socrates, who is charged with corrupting the youth of Athens, condemned and given poison.
DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:
The wrong people drank the poison. I don’t
see how this got past the first reading, unless someone has a sympathy for gay
writers. I don’t think I’m being
homophobic when I say this is pretentious dreck dressed up to be poetic
drama. Patrick is simply presenting a brief
for gay love, with a little (frustrated) voyeurism thrown in for good measure.
As far as I’m concerned, Patrick has been in a rut for years, and isn’t really worthy of a grant anymore. (He got one some ten years ago or so.) There are better gay plays—and playwrights—out there, and I see no reason to encourage Patrick. He’ll do what he wants anyway.
RECOMMENDATION:
Reject ____XXX____
Reject, but
express interest in writer ____________
Second
reading ____________
Other ____________
[I have several posts in which Robert Patrick figures. I’ve already referenced the review of “Hello, Bob”; there’s also “Is Waiting For Godot Trash?” posted on 17 April 2009, in which I respond to a column Patrick published in the New York Times in which he called Samuel Becket a hack and Waiting for Godot “trash.”]
*
* * *
[Leslie Lee (1930-2014) was a playwright, director, and professor of playwriting and screenwriting. About a decade after Robert Patrick made his mark in the Village’s Off-Off-Broadway theater, Lee trod the same streets. Lee also worked with the renowned Negro Ensemble Company.
[His play The First Breeze of Summer, presented by the NEC at the St. Mark's Playhouse in the East Village in 1975, received a 1975 Obie Award for Best Play; it moved to the Palace Theatre on Broadway and won a 1976 Tony Award nomination for Best Play, and an Outer Circle Critics Award.
[The War Party was staged by the NEC at Theater Four in the Theatre District in 1986, directed by the company’s artistic director, Douglas Turner Ward. It had previously been staged at New Dramatists, an organization of playwrights founded in 1949 and located in the Theatre District, in 1974.]
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIPS FOR AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS PROGRAM
1987 COMPETITION
PRE-SCREENING
SCRIPT EVALUATION
READER: [Rick]
DATE: 10/9/86
AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Leslie Lee
TITLE/DATE: The War Party, 1984
GENRE/STYLE: realistic drama
STRUCTURE: 2 episodic acts, w/flashbacks
SETTING: several locations around Philadelphia; suggested or fragmentary realism best
LANGUAGE: realistic dialogue, some in black English
MUSIC/LYRICS: none
NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 4 women, 8 men; most are black (2 very light-skinned)
CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: only few central characters are fully formed and complex w/inner conflicts; rest are flat types
CONCEPTION: search for racial identity by daughter of mixed marriage; portrait of poverty and its by-products
CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: subject matter; black themes
BRIEF SYNOPSIS:
___________________________________________________________
Kathy, a young Temple University student, volunteers to work for a community poverty-fighting group in North Philadelphia. She is drawn more and more to the black world, despite her white mother’s objections. She becomes involved with the group’s founder first, but leaves him for the second-in-command, a former professor. While the group is at a demonstration in another part of town, Kathy is left to handle the phones in the emergency center. In a final, senseless incident, she is killed hiding a local gang member from rival hoods. The play is told as a flashback, starting after Kathy’s death and returning to her mother and brother several times during the play.
DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: While The War
Party certainly deals with something worth exploring dramatically, it
ultimately fails to be dramatic. Despite
its apparent intentions, the play really ends up being little more than a black
melodrama. The characters are not very
interesting, and there are few surprises in either the action or the characters. The title, which refers to a planning session
for the rumble between the two rival gangs, doesn’t even seem to bear on the
main action of the play.
Lee has had a few successes, including a Broadway run (of The Last Breeze of Summer) 10 years ago, and could well be considered a mid-career writer. This script, however, is so mundane and flat that I do not feel compelled to recommend him for another Rockefeller grant. (Lee received Rockefeller awards between 1966 and 1968). This work is just not unique enough to warrant such a recommendation.
RECOMMENDATION:
Reject ____XXX____
Reject,
but express interest in writer ____________
Second
reading ____________
Other ____________
* *
* *
[Readings of this nature are fairly common in the developmental process for new plays, It shouldn’t be confused with “reader’s theater,” a form of performance that was popular in the middle of the 20th century. It usually consisted of material not written for the stage, such as short stories, long poems, letters, or diaries. Some notable examples are the famous 1951 Broadway production of Don Juan in Hell, part of act three of George Bernard Shaw’s four-act play Man and Superman and Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood, staged on Broadway in 1957
[The developmental readings are not performances; the spectators are present, usually by invitation, to help the writer and the theater directors get a preliminary idea how the script works before an audience. They also want to hear the play spoken aloud by actors.
[There are two kinds of these sorts of readings: staged and unstaged. An unstaged reading is just what the name implies: the actors are stationary, usually seated, with scripts in their hands or on music stands; there are no costumes or props and the action is implied by stage directions read by a stage manager or an additional actor, or mimed. There’s no movement except what an actor can do while seated or standing still.
[In a staged reading, the actors still carry scripts and costumes and props, if they exist at all, are minimal, but the actors will move around the performance area—though no actual set is created (pieces of scrounged furniture may be placed around to suggest a set). There is minimal rehearsal for either type of developmental reading, though the actors may have had some time to study the script.
[As a playwrights’ organization, New Dramatists holds readings often for the benefit of its members. Invited spectators are directors, artistic directors, literary managers, producers, and agents who have an interest in hearing new work or new artists.
[Steve Carter (1929-2020), whose full name was Horace E. Carter and his work is sometimes credited under that name, was a native New Yorker whose father was an African-American longshoreman from Richmond, Virginia, and his mother was from Trinidad.
[His best-known plays are a trilogy about Caribbean émigrés in the U.S.: Eden (1976), which I read before Primary Colors and saw in Los Angeles in 1989; Nevis Mountain Dew (1978); and Dame Lorraine (1981). The first two plays were produced by the renowned Negro Ensemble Company of New York City, whose staff Carter had joined in 1968. Carter later became director of the NEC Playwrights Workshop.
[The playwright left the NEC in 1981 and became the first playwright-in-residence at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre, who produced the last of the Caribbean Trilogy. Carter also had plays staged at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (the West Coast première of Eden in 1980) and the Theater of the First Amendment at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, among other theaters.
[Among his several awards and honors, in 2001, the National Black Theatre Festival bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.
[Carter’s Primary Colors shouldn’t be confused with the 1996 roman à clef by columnist Joe Klein about the 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campaign or the 1998 film of the same name.
[In April 1986, Dance Visions in Harlem staged a reading of Primary Colors. The play received another staged reading at the Victory Gardens Theatre in May 1986 as part of the company’s Reader Theater Series.]
StageArts READING EVALUATION
Date:
2/16/85 (script reading at New Dramatists, 2/15/85)
Evaluator: [Rick]
PRIMARY COLORS by Steve Carter
PLOT SYNOPSES: This is the working title of 2 short one-acts. The first is the story of a young black woman who grows up in the ’60s during the “black is beautiful” era, marries in the ’70s and matures in the ’80s, when the black community seems to be trying to become white. Because she is very dark, she is looked upon as a symbol of the African heritage of American blacks. In her childhood, her parents tell her that lighter is better and want her to marry a light-skinned man. In the ’60s, her darkness is admired, and she marries a man who. in line with the times, changes his name from Herbert to Hakim as a show of his African derivation. Into the ’80s, he becomes more and more conservative, and white. He has an affair with a white woman and leaves his wife. The black heroine has an affair with a married light-skinned black man. When her husband comes back to her, after the white woman ends the affair, she shoots him. When the lover comes to her after his wife finds out about their affair and divorces him, she also shoots him. She is sentenced to an asylum, where she refuses to speak to anyone. Believe it or not, this is all very funny.
The second piece deals with a blond white woman, growing up in the South, who is sent north to live after she defends herself against an attempted rape by her father. She marries a black man, and sends her wedding pictures home. Her father commits suicide, and her mother leaves home. After she has a baby, she separates from her husband when they discover they both got married to get even with her father. After an altercation with a black woman who insists that she has no right to have a black child, much less discipline him, she beats the child to death to prove that he is hers and she can discipline him.
THEME: Both playlets deal with the problem of racial identity: who is black and who is white. Carter doesn’t seem to be offering an answer to this dilemma, but he is exploring it from an unusual point of view.
GENRE/STYLE: Presentational heightened realism. There is a good deal of narration by the two main characters, and the audience is addressed directly. The first piece is a “black” (sorry about that) comedy; the second is far more bitter and bleak.
STRUCTURE: Episodic, connected by narration addressed to the audience.
SETTING: Unit set, probably an Our Town set-up.
LANGUAGE: Very sharp, literate, and compelling. Carter has a wonderful way with language. He can be perfectly realistic (Eden), or outrageously funny as in the first piece here. The humor in the first playlet is indigenous and organic, not jokes, and startling. The humor makes his point more directly, and the incongruity of the laughter makes you think more about what he’s saying.
CHARACTERS/CHARACTERIZATION: Only the lead women in both plays are at all developed as characters. The others are all sketches and cameos, though they seem real enough. In a sense, the supporting roles are all seen as memories of the two leading characters, not characters in their own rights.
EVALUATION/DISCUSSION: The first piece is absolutely wonderful. I found myself laughing before I even realized it was a comedy. Then I noticed how serious the humor was. It sneaks up on you. The woman’s reaction in the end (shooting her husband and lover) seems outrageous, but that seems a minor problem at this point. (Carter is apparently still working on the scripts.) The situation, which evolves out of a color experiment the woman saw as a schoolchild in Harlem in which the primary colors, red, blue and yellow, were blended in to white. This meant that “white was everything (i.e. all colors), and black was nothing,” an attitude adopted both by whites and blacks. This struck me as very powerful and pointed. The second piece was less appealing. I found it an odd, unhappy and disturbing play, though very compelling—the kind of thing you don’t want to look at, but can’t take your eyes off of.
I think Carter is an important new playwright. I doubt this material would work for us [i.e., StageArts], particularly since it was only an hour all together, but I’d like to keep an eye on him. I think he’s saying things about race that need to be said and aren’t. It is significant that he indicts his own people as much as the white society.
RECOMMENDATION: Reject (for now), but express interest in the writer. I’d like to see where Carter goes with this piece.
SOURCE: New Dramatists
* *
* *
[As I reported above, Theatre Junction was just forming in the spring of 1985. Cynthia Jenner wanted to launch a company run by dramaturgs and focus on both new plays and new performance forms. As readers will see in later postings, this encompassed new adaptations of non-dramatic material (including older sources) and translations.
[TJ, as it came to be called, was ultimately never realized, but in the months while Cynthia was starting the process, she was already looking for striking material and creative artists the new theater could present and I was among those doing some of the looking, research, digging, and reading.
[Heather McDonald was one of the playwrights in whom Cynthia was interested. She was young, just 26 when she wrote Available Light, a recent MFA-recipient from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ playwriting program. Cynthia’d seen a student production of McDonald’s previous play, Faulkner’s Bicycle, and I’d seen a later professional performance of it, on which I’d reported to Cynthia (my performance report is posted as part of “Women Playwrights of the ’80s” on 21 December 2018), who’d been quite taken with the play and the playwright.
[McDonald
(b. 1959) is a Canadian-born playwright who’s gone on to a career that includes
directing, screen- and libretto-writing,
and teaching. She’s taught at the
Kennedy Center Intensive at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
in Washington, D.C.; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and George
Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, among others.
[Available
Light was premièred in 1985 at the Humana Festival of the Actors Theater of
Louisville in Kentucky; it went on to have a production at Princeton’s McCarter
Theatre in New Jersey in 1996 and at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia,
in 2000.]
THEATRE JUNCTION SCRIPT EVALUATION
Date:
4/2/85
Reader:
[Rick]
AUTHOR: Heather McDonald
TITLE/(DATE): Available Light
GENRE/STYLE: Surrealistic drama
STRUCTURE: 22 scenes, no indicated act-break. Scenes vary in length and content; some are very short, including a monologue or song, others are longer and have essentially realistic dialogue, still others contain counter-point dialogue, recorded voices, songs, poetry. Play is circular in that the last scene repeats the first. Time is elastic and non-linear.
SETTING: Non-realistic representation of various locations around an early 19th-C. French village.
LANGUAGE: Poetic, alternately modern colloquial and "period" formal.
MUSIC/LYRICS: There is a tape, but I haven't heard it. The lyrics, written by McDonald, include one ballad and several other pieces that read a little like chants or children's songs. They serve both as scenic elements themselves or as undercurrents to speech.
NO. CHARACTERS/SPEC. NEEDS: 7 men (4 middle-aged or older, 3 teenagers), 5 women (2 adults, 3 children), recorded voices of villagers. The children, esp. 15-yr-old Pierre who is the lead, and 14-yr-old Clothilde, are very important and difficult roles for child actors. These will be hard to cast, and hard to direct.
CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: They are mostly sketched in, but are still whole characters. They function as more figures in a dream than realistic characters—we get to know bits about them and the way they think in bits and pieces. Much is left unexplained and mysterious.
CONCEPTION: I'm not absolutely sure about this. I think McDonald is saying that being independent, different and having dreams, while ordinarily good, can be dangerous and destructive if taken to the wrong kind of extreme. Pierre admires birds and wants to fly; he also wants to become a priest. His mother, Victoire, wants to be independent of her husband. Both alienate their neighbors and estrange the rest of their family. Ultimately, Pierre even brutally murders his family.
CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: Poetic language, non-linear time, dream-like treatment of plot elements.
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: This is really inadequate, since the play is not plotted in the conventional way: The Riviere family of a small French wine village in 1832 have a number of problems. One child, Jules, was brain-damaged by the midwife and will never be normal; Pierre, 15, reads incessantly, wants to be a priest, is trying to learn to fly and experiments with birds in weird ways; mother Victoire, increasingly dissatisfied with her lot, dreams of living in Paris, wearing extravagant clothes and dances alone in the woods; daughter Clothilde, 14, ardently wants to be a Harvest Maiden in the coming celebration but is saddled with a mother and brother who attract the wrong kind of attention, and father Daniel is laboring in a vineyard that is producing little but hard work and callouses. Victoire takes Daniel to court to get control of the land and furniture given as her dowery. Her behavior, and that of Pierre, anger the neighbors who think the Rivieres feel they are above the rest. In the end, despite his own peculiar behavior, Pierre is embarrassed by his mother's and upset with her ill treatment of his father. He murders his mother, sister and brother with a pruning hook and is caught and hanged.
DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: I find this play very disturbing. I presume it's supposed to work that way. I'm not really sure what McDonald was trying to say, but the style and theatricality of the play intrigue me. The play is definitely bleak and dark, and I wonder how an audience would take to it, but there is something I can't really pin-point that grabs at me. Pierre is a strange (!) character, but somehow sympathetic the way Alan Strang in Equus is (though in an admittedly darker way)—more so than his mother, whom I didn't like or appreciate. Of course, both are mad, and madness may be part of the point of the play. I confess, I would very much like to see this play performed; I wish I could have gone to Louisville to see it there.
The recent significance of McDonald's work (her Faulkner's Bicycle was done at Yale this winter) may make this unavailable, but she is certainly someone to watch. I do have some unpleasant news to pass on, however. A friend of mine was in the New York reading of Available Light and she told me she and the cast were very badly treated by the producers and the playwright. Among other disappointments, the reading was originally supposed to be a full showcase—which would have placed the script under the conversion clause of the showcase code. I won't relate the details, but it sounded like a series of maneuvers to duck the obligations and promised commitments to the cast when it looked like there might be a LORT [League of Resident Theatres] production at ATL in the offing. According to my friend, the problem was caused as much by McDonald as the producers.
RECOMMENDATION: Workshop.
There may already have been changes in the script from the ATL
production, but I would need to see this worked on for two reasons: the theme
is not clear to me, and my fears about the bleakness of the play must be
assuaged before I'd commit to a full production.
