I am drawn to quiet characters. I find with many of my plays my primary job is to give voice to a character who may not feel they have one, someone who is easily ignored or unseen. These characters are often women, and the kind of characters who would usually be assigned secondary or supporting role status. And I realize being drawn to the stories behind these passive or silent characters can be problematic in playwriting, a genre that depends on action. This dilemma, however, has helped me learn to be creative and to employ all the magical, unrealistic conventions that only theater can hold. My plays almost always begin as comedies, and almost always turn on me to become something deeper and more serious.
For example, in my play, Unbuttoning Virginia, a woman faces impending death. She struggles to unite her estranged family, seek forgiveness and find her voice after a life of passive obedience and submission. My one sentence summary is, "A dying woman finds her voice with the help of an imaginary friend." This play began, as many of mine seem to do, with a single image. I saw a grown woman scuttling across a hospital room floor and heard a voice saying, "There she goes!" – Initially I just thought it was a funny image, intriguing, but I felt in an instant that I knew something about this woman. I have always been interested in quiet people, the ignored, invisible or dismissed. The opening scene came quickly and all of a piece. A woman in her late fifties or early sixties is feeling alone, near the end of her life and at the mercy of an absurd, indifferent hospital. Then, her childhood friend, who we soon find out had actually died in an avalanche years before, magically appears to cheer her up and give her courage. My first intention was that this play would simply be a satire on getting lost in the bureaucracy and impersonal machinations of modern medicine. Of course, it became something much more complex as I continued to explore Virginia’s situation.
My bliss is to sit in a theater and watch a rehearsal. What I relish about being a playwright is the development and rehearsal process, the community that gathers to work together to bring a play to life. Theater is a communal art. As the playwright, I am just one cog in the wheel, maybe the first one, but not the most important. My work provides a vehicle for a many other artists’ work. I know my plays are not finished until they have been filtered through a director’s brain, designers’ imaginations and actors’ voices. They show me the way through my revision, help me articulate the tricky bits and guide me to the heart of the play. It has been my experience that often I don’t know what a play I have written is really about until I experience it with an audience. For me, it is the audience finally, who finishes a play. Sometimes this has been unsettling. Making an audience of grown men cry during the first production of my first play was frightening. I saw the power of my writing. I had to see the power of my writing.