- Oct 18, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 30, 2024
Growing up as an actor, I always believed actors were born, not made. Certainly, one can learn techniques of speaking and movement, period styles, etc. But I’ve never seen a mediocre actor become great. Writers are another thing altogether. There may be folks born with the gift of gab or a preternatural understanding of the English language, but they do not appear from the ether ready-made writers. Writers need training, feedback, honing, workshopping. They must be taught.
I’ve been blessed in my life with teachers who made me the writer I am now. What am I? A playwright first and foremost, a poet, and a sometime writer of nonfiction with a focus on criticism and personal essays. Each of the following people contributed to these sometimes-disparate elements, although there is a connection between drama and poetry that is surprising to some folks, though not to me. Both forms seem to be a kind of calling out to the gods for help in understanding the world. One just goes about it in a slightly different way.
I was eleven when I wrote my first blackout sketches and monologues and fourteen when I wrote my first short play, seventeen for the first full-length. Those early works would not have been possible without the support of two teachers who were not my playwriting teachers, but their guidance and provisions were essential to my earliest days of dramatic writing.
Elizabeth Adkisson was the acting teacher at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). In my ninth-grade year, we began hosting a student-run coffee-house night in the black box studio theatre and this was the first time I did readings and productions of my plays. Most, I’m sure, I would balk at if I watched them today, though they do exist on rotting video tape. One night, I asked Elizabeth to listen in on the first play which made me proud—a twenty scene romp entitled Hopeless Romantics. It was based on a list of questions I had about women and featured two guys at a bar asking them and attempting to answer in curious, non-adult ways.
We had to have a chaperone on sight for the coffee house, so she stayed behind the homemade bleachers and listened as I and another actor sped through the piece, dodging thrown shoes from the audience because, even then, I had no filter, and I wrote with complete abandon in terms of content. Afterwards, I asked her opinion. I was all of fifteen. Of course, as my acting teacher, she wanted to criticize my diction, but something struck her obviously and she brought to my attention a regional playwriting award for which I could submit the piece.
Southern PlayWorks was the only company in Birmingham devoted to new works. At the time, they had the responsibility for giving out the Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award. One of its prior winners (for the hilarious Holmes & Watson) was Lee Eric Shackleford, the Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He responded to the facile, stichomythic dialogue (Seinfeld-like, I’m sure) and awarded me first prize. The prize included, I think, some cash, a framed award with my middle initial printed wrong, and a reading supervised by a local director and actors.
The reading itself was a bust. Somehow the madcap romp my friend and I had performed in the studio theatre fell flat in the ASFA Performance Hall, where the ceremony was held. The director and I did not get along—she was one of many who was concerned at the immaturity of characters allegedly in their twenties and thirties—and the actors must have been on Xanax or something that afternoon. Nevertheless, both Adkisson and Shackleford kept track of my development.
The next year, Elizabeth agreed for a friend of mine to direct two of my new one-acts for his senior project. The plays were a cyclical drama, A Plumber’s Story, and a paper-thin romantic comedy, More Than Words. On Elizabeth and the director’s suggestion, I was banned from rehearsals so he could learn his directorial craft. While he left A Plumber’s Story alone, to my great surprise, More Than Words was chopped up, re-written, and mangled to suit popular taste. But, based on the strength of A Plumber’s Story, Elizabeth began to take me seriously as a writer. She submitted a never-produced one-act of mine, Call Waiting, to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Young Southern Writers’ Project and asked me to collaborate on a full-length adaptation as my senior project.
Shackleford had other ideas in mind. Money for Southern PlayWorks was going dry, but it just happened to be that he had (I hope) a promising playwright in his midst, so he decided to produce and direct a night of one-act plays written by student playwrights. The evening was called Four Blinks of the Eye. It seemed to me “Shack,” as I called him, was going through a wistful spell remembering his youth as, around this time, he produced one of his most mature plays, May Flies Fast. So, the “four blinks” were four snapshots of life as seen from young people. The first half of the evening consisted of Hopeless Romantics and a much re-written version of More Than Words that was more of a dramedy that lost a lot of its initial humor. The show was, overall, well-attended and we young playwrights were given our first royalty checks. We felt and were treated like professionals. That’s what “Shack” did for me—along with including a more mature one-act of mine, Above the Mountains, in his first night of ten-minute plays he produced at UAB some three years later.
Back to ASFA, Elizabeth had picked out a classic Russian comedy, Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin’s The Minor as our mainstage show my senior year, but the script was hopelessly outdated and in a translation that did not help matters one bit. Our agreement is she would find a suitable way to adapt it for contemporary audiences and I would write the dialogue and stage directions. The result was Discordia, a futuristic comedy. The play was (and is) terrible, but it was a legitimate, two-act play. I also found my love for adaptation which I’ve since treated as a collaboration between a living and a deceased writer. Walking in another writer’s shoes to see why they did this or chose that was a remarkable experience and I’ve continued the work in adaptations and translations of plays by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Henrik Ibsen, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Washington Parke Custis.
Then, “Shack” and Liz sent me off to college for a professional playwriting education. At Bennington, I was grounded academically by the Pulitzer Prize-nominated fiction writer and playwright Gladden Schrock, a seven-foot-tall bear of a man whose output consisted of many counterculture works from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. His The Green Lute, in its premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre (where he was a founding member along with his Yale buddies Jon Jory and Stacy Keach), starred a young James Cromwell and a (believe it or not) young Abe Vigoda, though I’m sure he still looked old even in 1965. His plays Madam Popov, Glutt, and Taps railed against the “me” generation following the peace movement of the 1960s. Schrock’s crowning achievement was Letters from Alf, a 1973 novel that has smatterings of The Catcher in the Rye, Man’s Fate, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but with half the solipsism and thrice the intelligence.
Schrock had been taught by John Gassner at Yale, Gassner being the great anthologizer of American drama at the time American drama was worth anthologizing. Gassner was taught by George Pierce Baker, the first person to teach playwriting in an academic setting. He had taken his ideas to Harvard, where he was rejected, and eventually landed at Yale, which is still the university most associated with producing some of the best theatrical artists of the day. While Schrock’s education was very traditional, his plays were rather avant-garde, perhaps influenced by Beckett to a fault. But where Beckett was minimalist in language, Schrock’s plays were chock full of words only Shakespearean-level actors could hope to render. As a wordsmith, he was a maximalist to the nth degree and his plays should be more well known because Glutt, in particular, describes this miserable day and age as much as it did in its own time.
On the other hand, I interned two years with David Henry Hwang, the Tony and Obie Award-winning playwright of FOB, M. Butterfly, Golden Child, and other classics of Asian-American theatre. He was taught by Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés (the latter often considered one of the best playwriting teachers the country ever had). So, David’s education was experimental in nature while his plays strike a chord between traditional comedy/drama and moments of lilting, poetic beauty (most often on display in his work for opera). I felt, with the two, I had two genetic linkages of playwriting from which to drawn on. To have a link to the writer of the seminal Dramatic Technique and to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Shepard was not too shabby.
Schrock did just about everything to get me to drop his course. He sent me to the library where there was one copy of our textbook which we all had to share, and he referred to the work I brought to school as having not one single interesting character. He was tough, but fair. It took two years until he said one day, “You’ve walked in the room a different person” and we became fast friends. For years after Bennington, he would read my work and comment through e-mail. David showed me the ins and outs of professional New York theatre, exposing me to Broadway and Off-Broadway work and allowing me to tag along to business meetings, introducing me to other writers I loved, and landing me a gig as a Production Assistant on a James Lapine play in the winter of 2003.
Also at Bennington, I studied screenwriting with the producer/biographer Steven Bach, whose book Final Cut, about the making of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (which he was personally involved in) is a standard tome for cinephiles. Bach believed I was a better screenwriter than playwright, though I never remember him seeing any of my plays. Nevertheless, his friendship and our mutual adoration of Stephen Sondheim made us bosom buddies. Just like with Schrock and Hwang’s works, I’m proud to have an inscribed, signed copy of Final Cut near my mantle.
I never studied poetry at all. I submitted material to try and gain acceptance into courses at Bennington but was always turned down. Nevertheless, I took it back up a few years after college and poetry provides me a break when I’m stuck on a play and a place for me to explore ideas that are not inherently theatrical. Being self-taught, my poems may not strike you as particularly good, but one did win a prize, so at least I have that.
As far as non-fiction, this was the ass-kicker. As far as forming words, I had Wayne Hoffman-Ogier, an instructor at Bennington who helped me reign in my excesses on essays. Through reading gorgeous prose such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, I learned a lot from his wisdom and guidance. He struck me as a craftsman extraordinaire and I soaked up all I could. While I have never written much fiction, I also learned a lot from two novelists, Rebecca T. Godwin (Keeper of the House) and Mark Jude Poirier (Goats). Godwin taught on a class on the works and writing lives of Welty, Woolf, and O’Connor which was my favorite class second only to A Capella Choir and Poirier took me on in a course reading Moliére and writing flash fiction. My fiction was never good, but I can’t help thinking the assistance of these three teachers helped me hone the prose I write today—weekly, for you.
Take a moment and remember your teachers—what they did for you, what they didn’t do for you. One must always take one’s advice with a grain of salt, but if you know how to sift through what’s right and wrong, you can learn a lot from someone whose been produced or published.
