I Have Not Yet Begun to Write

At another one of the Oppressed Majority (Women) Seminars in New York today, I was brought to a realization about one thing and it shook me to the core. If you come in to sell your script and it is all about you, you will fail. The script is not about me. It is about the actors and the director. The designers. And most importantly, it is about the Audience. I often say that a Playwright is the only artist forced to present a canvas in which she has not used all her colors. The actors are, say, the red and the set is the blue. We cannot begin to perceive what the finished play will look like until it is framed in a theater and yet we must make the reader and the listener get where we are going and what we want. We have to make them picture it vividly.  A play is not a picture in a frame. A play isn't even a movie that is set in stone, and, while shown to many audiences, is not flexible. Every performance of a play is its own work of art because of the actors and the audience. The laughs will happen in different places every night. I remember seeing an actress performing "Suddenly Last Summer" the day after she had gotten terrible reviews. She burned the building down! She heard what they said and she made Williams sing. And that's what theater is, children. One performance at a time. I thought I had good plays. I thought I knew what I had to do. I have not yet begun to do it for you. Watch.