Looking both ways
Gina Gionfriddo, Rolin Jones and Adam Rapp on traveling the two-way street between theatre and screen
Moderated by Sarah Hart
The siren song of film and television—leeching the theatre’s best and brightest—has generated quite a bit of hand-wringing, especially when it comes to playwriting. Theresa Rebeck famously threw down the gauntlet in 1995, issuing her opinion in the Dramatists Guild newsletter that there should be space for writers to lend their talents to both stage and screen—which earned her a hefty share of field-wide scorn. The writers’ strike this past winter led Charles Isherwood of the New York Times to beseech prodigal playwrights—tongue only somewhat in cheek—“Return to the fold! Fate has given you another shot at artistic redemption. Don’t let it slip away.” But even as the theatre community convenes panel discussions to cope with ominous talent drain, a growing number of writers (and actors, directors, etc.) are making a dual- or tri-media lifestyle work—without abandoning the theatre.
| Related Links: Cutting Loose with Adam Rapp by David Ng (American Theatre) Humana Festival 2007: The Complete Plays, including The Open Road Anthology co-written by Rolin Jones (TCG Books) |
So if the boundaries are more porous than they used to be—or are at least becoming that way—does it change the way writers are creating theatre? Does it—perhaps more subversively—change accepted forms in television and film? For its 32nd Humana Festival of New American Plays, Kentucky’s Actors Theatre of Louisville and American Theatre convened playwrights Gina Gionfriddo, Rolin Jones and Adam Rapp to delve into the culture and aesthetics of crossing media, setting aside—for the most part—the issue of financial disparity (though, insists Gionfriddo, “it’s something we should never stop talking about”).
For Showtime’s “Weeds,” starring Mary-Louise Parker, Jones is bemused to receive all the serious scenes for rewrites. “I’m the serious guy over there. That’s not necessarily my wheelhouse in the theatre world,” says the writer, who dreamed up an emotionally stunted 20-year-old agoraphobic robotics expert bent on discovering her Chinese birth mother via an android doppelgänger for The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. “‘Law & Order’ is about resolution,” notes Gionfriddo of her work for NBC’s procedural shows. “I think my plays are about no resolution.” Indeed, her Becky Shaw, at Humana this year, is a crackling tale of relationships unraveling, with no final answers. Rapp has found more artistic space in his film work—including 2005’s Winter Passing and a screen adaptation of his play Blackbird in 2007—than in his stint as a writer for “The L Word,” also on Showtime, in 2006, but both diverge from his stage work, in which he prefers to keep his characters in one room.
No matter the venue or form, it is—as Jones points out—all storytelling, and any chance to hone craft feeds the theatre.
SARAH HART: Can you talk first about writing for television? What is the process? What is the room like?
GINA GIONFRIDDO: The “Law & Order” shows are a little bit atypical in that we don’t have a room [for collaborative writing]. They tend to be run more like benign dictatorships—you work with one other person, then the two of you go up against the big boss.
ROLIN JONES: For “Weeds,” we get together at the start of the year. We’ve got boards all over the place, then a couple of slaves to write things on the boards. We plot out the entire season—events, character arcs, how we’re going to try not to piss off Mary-Louise. It’s very collegial—the non-loneliest writing job ever. You’re just bouncing each other back and forth. Then we’re handed out individual stories or episodes. You’re delivered your plot, so you’re just coming up with bullshit dialogue. Then it goes up to network, and they give you strange dramaturgy, and you kind of ignore it. And then you’ve got five days to shoot it. If you can’t get it in, you have to rewrite a little bit because it’s money and time, and then we edit it, so by the time you guys see it, it’s this watered-down, horrible, sad thing that was once something beautiful. And occasionally there’s something lovely that actually ends up there.
ADAM RAPP: “The L Word” was a room with catered food and occasional yoga and me and six wonderful lesbians. There was a woman from a lesbian rock band called BETTY; a young Bay Area graphic novelist; A.M. Homes, the novelist; Rose Troche, who wrote and directed Go Fish; I was the playwright; and the showrunner, Ilene Chaiken, was a TV person. She was the queen and we were the sort of smart minions. We were the band jamming, and she was like, “I like that section.” I was expecting it to be adversarial. I was the only male voice in the room. I didn’t know television very well. I was expecting the four-act structure or the six-act structure of cliff-hanging, all that stuff that people have to do on network. But there was no pressure for that because we’re not trying to sell Kit Kat bars every 12 minutes.
GIONFRIDDO: That’s a major difference. On “Law & Order,” we have to structurally build in act ends that will bring people back after the commercial break. Also, we don’t do the beginning-of-the-season arcs because our shows are designed to make money in syndication. They don’t want a serial component. They want self-contained stories.
Being the playwright, do you feel like your job is different than the other TV writers? Are you more focused on structure?
GIONFRIDDO: Because procedurals can become a little like machines, I tend to be the character person: “You just told her her son was murdered. She needs to have more of a reaction.” “Law & Order” is like working with a poetic form. The challenge is getting a compelling story told within this rigorous little formula. The danger is that it becomes all about the trick and the clue—unless you have character. When I did “Criminal Intent,” we were almost all playwrights, but I’m on the original “Law & Order” staff now, and half the writers are lawyers, some of whom began with the show in an advisory capacity. I think we complement each other. They can do the procedural nuts-and-bolts, the inspired legal strategies. Writers who are coming from playwriting or short-story writing will focus more on character.
JONES: We’ve had four playwrights: me, Rinne Groff, Blair Singer and Ron Fitzgerald. There are a lot of frustrated sitcom writers who were tired of doing network television, who wanted to be free and tell different kinds of stories. You want a cacophony for an effective room. I did come from a very different perspective, but four years into it I’m flexing a different muscle. My writing is much more event-oriented, especially having to deal with terrific but demanding actors. You have to find real wants and needs for them.
What has your work in other media brought back to your playwriting?
RAPP: A lot more economy. The compression of scenes and getting in and out of the room is really important in television and film. The mood is more important than dialogue. You can show more in a reaction shot than you can in four exchanges of dialogue. Learning how to compress has made me a better editor and a better first-draft writer. My theatre scripts are a little leaner now. I generally write a very sprawling first draft. I think I’m a little closer now to what it becomes in a second draft because of the muscle I’ve been developing in film and TV.
GIONFRIDDO: When I was in college, I took a class with Romulus Linney and he used to try to hammer home that worse than being overly explicit in a play was being willfully obscure. I sort of couldn’t hear that. When I started writing “Law & Order,” I would talk about a character having four underlying motives that were competing. They said to me, “We can’t do Scenes from a Marriage. This is a 42-minute teleplay. If you want the audience to know those things are going on, you need to show it.” So it has helped me to be a little more disciplined about putting in the play what was in the head.
In terms of pace, you have it at both ends: It’s a 42-minute teleplay, which is much shorter than anything you would write for the theatre, but at the same time you stretch the story over a season or several seasons. Does dealing with that fuller, longer storyline affect your playwriting also?
JONES: We’re on season four, so this is the 19th hour of Mary-Louise’s drug-dealing mom. The Godfather was six hours, for crying out loud. What’s left to do? And if anybody watches our show, you know we’re horrible with time. It’s supposed to have taken three years—but if you look at the stories, it’s been like three weeks. You’re still only writing those very encapsulated, Aristotelian, three-day, pressure-packed things. There’s a lot of baton-writing to the next episode. It’s a challenge to go back into a play in that you’ve got breadth and time to get your story encapsulated. It’s like writing a season. We break a season into three acts—episode 5 is the end of Act 1, episode 10 is the end of Act 2.
RAPP: I can talk about it from the filmmaking point of view. I only got about three days of rehearsal with the principals in my first film. The actors fly in and they go to their trailer, and you meet them and you discuss the scene for like 16 minutes, then you go block it, they’re setting up, and then you’re shooting a rehearsal. You’re giving them notes based on a rehearsal. It’s like learning how to build a fire without any instruments. Then you’re in the editing room and it’s a kind of rewriting process. I realized, six months after we shot it and I’m still in the editing room, that it’s a superficial, manipulative form. I was so starving to get back in an organic process in the theatre where you’re actually dealing with people—where you’re in a five-week rehearsal and having more than a five-minute conversation.
Generally in my stuff, especially in the theatre, people get in one room and they stay there until someone has to leave. The film and TV stuff is one scene and the next. I was getting notes from producers like, “This is a six-page scene.” I was like, “I generally write 40-page scenes.” “How are you going to shoot this?” I learned that the information the audience had to know had to come on page point-five in order for it to actually work in this medium. I was happy to get back to writing real-time scenes in rooms.
Do you find yourself writing into your plays things you could never do in television or film?
JONES: I don’t put that private part of myself in the TV stuff. You’ve got to save it. If there’s a great idea that’s come up in the room, something for me, I will squirrel it away like a little nut.
RAPP: They own us. They own our copyright.
GIONFRIDDO: That’s a big deal for me. Until you’re a showrunner, your scripts are to some extent rewritten. I’ve had to learn not to invest so much that I’m heartbroken when something is cut.
RAPP: I wrote a pilot for 20th Century Fox. They came after me, saying, “We love your theatre, we love your characters, we love your dialogue, and we love how unique your voice is.” So I wrote this thing set in the barrio in New York, an apartment building that was being gentrified. There were all these variously aged people—a little girl who was stealing soap from everybody’s apartment, and an old couple in their senior years, and a weird loner guy and a band in the basement. I was really excited about it. And they said, “Can we make the 35-year-old woman who has the shaky hands like 22 and really sexy?” They think I have a good voice, but ultimately they just want to water it down like everything else. I don’t understand why they keep coming after people like us—but I guess it’s the skill or the craft that we learn in the theatre. It’s really hard to hold an audience for two hours when you don’t have quadraphonic surround sound and commercials that move like music videos. We have to develop skills in the theatre that are really difficult. It’s interesting to me that they go after the playwrights—and it’s a sexy thing to have a playwright on your staff—but when you actually come up with a complex character or something you’ve learned to deal with in the theatre, they don’t want to use that skill. It may not be across the board, but it seems like there’s a dumbing down.
JONES: You’d be hard-pressed to find better writing in the theatre or in movies than was done on “The Wire,” which just ended on HBO. HBO has really opened up television to be able to tell adult stories. That’s changed things. That’s why I think this line, this separation between theatre and TV, can be starting to blur to the extent that we can just talk about it as storytelling. They do, on HBO, want your shaky-hand thing, I think.
GIONFRIDDO: The fantasy for those of us writing for network is that at a place like HBO or Showtime you won’t get the stupid network notes. Network television is in a very, very dire place right now. The fall season tanked. It tanked because the shows weren’t good—and the reason the shows weren’t good, I’m convinced, is because there are too many people on salary to give notes. We’re somewhat insulated at “Law & Order” because of Wolf Films’s track record. But new shows can really be ruined by the network notes process, I think. You get 15 sets of notes from executives who need to justify their salaries, and you may have had an interesting product at the beginning, but you don’t at the end. That happens because the notes are generally about the “relatability” and likability of the characters. The goal is not to offend. I don’t know if we’re giving network audiences enough credit. I grew up on Norman Lear’s stuff, which was about poverty and racism, and that was all done on network.
JONES: Well, “All in the Family” would be on HBO now.
GIONFRIDDO: I watched “Sanford and Son” the other day. I don’t know where that show would be. It is a one-set show set in a junkyard. They would never let you put that on.
Do you consider your audiences for film and television differently than you would for theatre?
RAPP: I’d like to believe that, in New York at least, we try to bring the younger audiences in, and I think we do succeed in some cases. But generally in the theatre we’re writing for older and older people, and that’s really frustrating. Jim Ryan is a playwright who now teaches at the New School and doesn’t write very many plays anymore. He wrote and directed a film called The Young Girl and the Monsoon, which was originally a play at Playwrights Horizons. I was on a panel with him, and he was saying that the new Off Broadway is independent film. The price to see an independent film is what it used to be to see an Off-Broadway play. That’s the kind of storytelling you used to get when you’d see American Buffalo Off Broadway.
JONES: I don’t know if it was any different when I was going to theatre. The Mark Taper Forum was sort of my home when I was a kid. I’d go and be the only young guy. I’m still writing for the 20 kids that are there—for myself, when I was sitting there.
GIONFRIDDO: When I lived in Rhode Island, straight out of college, this was the bane of my existence. I had all of these friends who would drop enormous amounts of money on martinis and food, and then you’d say, “Do you want to go see this play? It’s $35,” and they’d say, “That’s a little rich for my taste.”
JONES: Martinis are delicious.
GIONFRIDDO: They’re delicious, and you always know what you’re getting.
JONES: A bad play is a lot worse than a bad martini. Bad theatre is brutal. But watching Gina’s play yesterday, the guy playing the lead [David Wilson Barnes] was just nailing everything. The rhythm with that laughing—you can’t have that thing that goes back and forth between the audience and the play, riding that wave, in TV or film. If you wrote the movie version of Becky Shaw, there would be different rhythms and it would have to be edited in a way to replicate what happened last night.
GIONFRIDDO: It’s why I haven’t successfully written a screenplay. You can’t have that much dialogue in a movie.
JONES: I think you can do it. All the screwball comedies, like the Cary Grant movies, are at your pace. There’s still the walk-and-talk in “The West Wing.” You just have to edit it to recreate what you’re doing with two people conversing on the couch. Remember Six Degrees of Separation? That was a play that kind of existed on couches. In the film, they just put that on its feet, so everyone was moving constantly to try to get that energy that was in that Lincoln Center production. Not that that was necessarily the most successful adaptation ever—but in terms of audience, all you’re doing is moving these seats over and over again.
RAPP: It’s fascinating to watch Woody Allen films because they are just master shots. What he does is so theatrical. I worked with Will Ferrell on my first film [Winter Passing], and he was in Melinda and Melinda just before. He said Woody Allen will shoot a scene 40 times. We were doing three takes on my little indie film. I said, “Does he give you notes?” He said, “Well, he kind of just says, ‘Let’s do it again.’” But you would get into this rhythm, and what you’re doing is rehearsing. You’re rehearsing a stage scene.
GIONFRIDDO: David Fincher does that, too.
RAPP: Ultimately he’s shooting a master shot—and it goes master shot to master shot to master shot. He’s essentially using theatrical techniques as a filmmaker. You look at a two-person scene in most movies and when they go into the over-the-shoulder, you know it was a four-page scene that got cut down. That’s what going in close does. It gives them the ability in the editing room to completely recreate and condense a scene.
JONES: Well, it’s hard to pop out. Once you go in, you’ve got to have a reason in your scene to break. This big moment will happen, and there’s nothing left to say, and then you go out to this master and sit there. It’s kind of like a theatre beat. That’s how that language works. It’s interesting what great training theatre is for this, if you kind of unlock your mind. You’re at a competitive advantage, I think, if you’ve had to make it work like this.
RAPP: We control the eye in the theatre by doing really good staging and really great acting and great lighting. But still, it’s a big master shot, and anybody over there can look anywhere they want. So every moment has to be valued, whereas I think in the film world, we can be sloppy and then recreate it in the editing room.
JONES: You actually want slop. You want options so you can try to get that spontaneity back in. Because otherwise film can be really canned and dead.
With the blurring of the lines between all of these media—for writers, actors and other artists—do you see a shift in the way theatre is made?
RAPP: Alex Cunningham, who had a play at Humana [in 2000], No. 11 (Blue and White), and writes for “Desperate Housewives” now, was at Juilliard with me in 1999 and 2000. What she was writing were definitely plays, but they were plays with 72 scenes. She never said anything but “I want to write film and TV.” She was working on her technique through the theatre. During that time in New York there were all these plays with so many scenes and so much furniture being shuffled on and off. It was like watching a banquet. I love getting people in a room and leaving them there. I love The Heiress. I love watching people sit in a chair and wait. So I was wondering, “What’s going on? Are we becoming more like film and TV?” But I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think there might have been a reaction to that, and people putting on plays now in New York are valuing the room more than they were.
GIONFRIDDO: I agree. It’s such a different landscape now that you have networks like HBO, Showtime and FX, because writers have an outlet for complex storytelling there. So I think who stays writing for theatre is interesting. I’m fascinated by who keeps coming to see theatre. I could get the DVDs of “Six Feet Under” and “The Sopranos” and stay in my apartment and watch really great, complicated storytelling. So if I keep going out to the theatre—why do I do that? I get a little Pollyanna about it. To go to the theatre when you’ve got all this good stuff at home—you’re looking for something big.
JONES: Big is totally the word. No more fucking plays about looking for an apartment in New York City. Wrestle with some big shit here. You do have to pay more for it. And you do have live actors working their fucking asses off, and you have people coming who can see a different version of it on TV. Save your big ideas. Be big.
GIONFRIDDO: You can’t put “Law & Order” on stage because “Law & Order” is at home, and it’s free. So I don’t want to see a procedural play.
RAPP: My first year at the O’Neill [Playwrights Conference], in 1996, Lloyd Richards asked, “Who knows what the definition of a playwright is?” There were 11 playwrights, and I was the youngest and Lee Blessing was the oldest. No one said anything, and he said, “The definition of a playwright is: You’re walking down the street in the middle of Manhattan, and somebody taps you on the shoulder, and it’s a busy street and there’s traffic, and they say, ‘I have something really, really important to say. It happens at 8:00. You have to drop all of the things you were supposed to do tonight. You have to pay about $40 to $80. You have to get on a subway.’ That’s what a playwright is.” I think when we write, we aspire to ask big questions, and when we don’t it just becomes an exercise. To go to the theatre and sit among people you don’t know in the dark and await something magical to happen—it had better be really, really powerful.
JONES: Plus, all the people who are working on your play, who have completely screwed their quality of life to do this thing—don’t bring limp-dick writing. I haven’t written a full-length play in three years. I’m not going to waste anybody’s time, or mine, if it’s not big. There’s a level of pressure that’s sometimes not necessarily helpful, but you do have to check yourself about that. All this conversation about losing playwrights to TV—if you’re a real playwright and you really love the theatre, it ain’t ever going to happen. You’re never competing with film and TV for our hearts and the best of our work. It’s already fixed. It’s a crack addiction. None of us is going to make any money at it. So we’re doing it for this other reason.
RAPP: I left “The L Word” in the middle of the season to take a play to the Edinburgh Festival that I got no money for. I got on a plane. I’d just had back surgery. My friends said, “What are you doing? You’re giving up your salary!” I actually enjoyed writing “The L Word.” I enjoyed all the stuff that it did for me. I loved the people I worked with. But it was the crack of the theatre.
If it weren’t for the money, would you still go to write for television? Do you feel like there’s a value in the form?
JONES: It’s fun storytelling—it’s all storytelling. There’s stuff you cannot do on stage that you can do on TV. The visual aspect of it is lovely. I think it can be artful. If the MacArthur genius grant dropped in my lap, yeah, maybe I would take eight years and do nothing but theatre. Poverty doesn’t help your theatre career. It doesn’t make you a better playwright because you have to go wait tables or cater. That takes just as much of your energy away as your “soul-sucking TV job.”
RAPP: I won’t do TV anymore. It’s not because I don’t want to be paid—it’s because I don’t want to interrupt my life in the way that I had to. I want to have as many good experiences as I can in the theatre, fiction, maybe some films. But I’ll tell you: The TV thing really, really helped me get on my feet financially and finally get out of a hole. Writing for theatre is a third-class citizenship. I had two plays at Rattlestick [Playwrights Theater in New York City] in the past few years, and they’re a great company that I have great respect for. They pay you a thousand dollars. If you write one play a year and that gets done—that’s worse than working at McDonald’s. There’s no health in that. The Dramatists Guild doesn’t have benefits. That’s another thing we have to think about.
GIONFRIDDO: TV has been a much better adjunct to playwriting than what I was doing before—teaching freshman composition, catering. All of that really sucked the energy out of me in a way that TV doesn’t.
JONES: One of the other seductive things that doesn’t come in your personal pocketbook is that you can finally cast your actor friends. In the TV world, you’re producer. You can give them jobs. You have no idea the great pleasure and the great joy it is to be able to deliver for your friends in that way.
GIONFRIDDO: It’s one of the greater joys of my life.
RAPP: I’ve become friends with Craig Wright. He was on “Six Feet Under,” then “Lost” for a while, and now he has his own show, “Dirty Sexy Money.” I talk to him all the time about how much he loves the theatre. We did Orange Flower Water at Edge Theatre Company [in New York City] a few years ago and he came and he was having this kind of religious experience. But I do think there is the danger—we go from making no money to making six-figure incomes, and suddenly we get a taste of a car and a decent meal three times a week.
GIONFRIDDO: But—and this sticks in my craw—I don’t know any playwrights who stopped writing plays because they wanted a personal jet and a vacation home. What I see is people like Diana Son, who has three kids and is looking ahead to three college tuitions. None of us have kids. Once you have children with tuitions, with needs, I think that’s the “lifestyle” that keeps writers in television rather than theatre.
JONES: In the theatre, though, as a writer, you’re treated like a rock star—and you’ll never get that in TV and film. You might be able to call your parents and not be ashamed anymore because you’re actually making a living. But god bless Humana, for keeping me alive and bringing me here for these 10-minute plays for the past three years. My self-worth as a writer is all about what I do in the theatre.