Michael Weller’s play BEAST is in the thick of previews at New York Theater Workshop, and there is some serious paper flying around. On my way to rehearsal today I got a call from the production stage manager: “Did you get those new pages from Michael yet?” I’d been checking my email every 15 minutes for a rewritten Scene Six, as the cast is hungry to know what words will be coming out of their mouths tonight. Fair enough; even as the script continues to change daily, the actors have to get up there and make the show happen every night.
As I walked up to the theater door, I heard the iPhone bell that means “Email! Email!”– and skipped the theater to go straight to the copier. My mind broke into a run: Do not stop. Send words through the ether to the printer. Squeeze the words out of the printing machine. Print copies of the words onto sheets of white paper. Give the words to the nine bodies waiting in the red seats in there. Go. Go. Go.
Writing/ building/ making new plays requires monumental focus from everyone in the room. You can sink into this collective focus and be sealed inside. You can enter a theater in the bright light of morning and leave in the dead of night, wondering how the world managed to spin out the day so quickly. In these dark rooms, especially in the final days of rehearsal for a new play, you sometimes encounter wonderful and terrifying moments in which you come up for air, shake loose the tight focus from your mind, and come to. And sometimes what you “come to” to is a room full of paper. No, really; full. Sheets laid on every surface, whose page numbers have given up trying to control the situation and lie exhausted on their little page corners. Scribbles in three different hands sprinkled across the surface of the tundra, tangled battle plans, some aborted, some never tried. When you sit looking at the wreckage, having come to, there can be a brief moment of existential crisis. Words are the arbritrary symbols littering the floor, tiny black tangled shapes that might as well be spilled filaments on white tile in moments like this. There is a sense of both futility and uneasy power: The way we shuffle and arrange these little prickly creatures will dictate, in a few hours, what happens in the imaginary but fully constructed lives embodying this play’s world. And it will dictate the choices, in voice and body, that these decidedly un-imaginary actors have to make– again, in just a few hours. Realities rise and fall with the order of five words in a sentence. One italicized word can destroy an entire human relationship. An extra three lines can drag the whole world to a dead stop. The stakes are high.
In these moments playwriting seems more like a combination of math and music theory. How many beats can this section sustain? Do we need a few more notes? If Johnny says this and Jane responds with that, what conclusion will we be left with? I suspect these sorts of questions could unfold forever among those who love a play. That’s the blessing in freezing a script– there is an endpoint to the conversation. But it also feels at times like we are rushing toward a moment that we wish wouldn’t arrive: the moment when there’s no longer any paper, no more little black marks scuttling back and forth across a page, no more page numbers to wrangle. This thing will soar out into open air soon, into a room of between zero and a hundred ninety nine strangers (let’s hope it’s closer to 199), either to fly or to fall. And at that point we can’t adjust the math or the music; it’s out there on its own.