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Making a New Play Out of Old Pieces
By Jack Marshall
After decades, indeed centuries, of conclusive evidence to
the contrary, many play-goers persist in believing that
all a director does is tell actors where to move, just as
many believe that an actor's greatest challenge is
memorizing lines. Undoubtedly, there
are
some directors, even some well-known and critically
acclaimed ones, who don't do much more than direct
traffic, and there are definitely professional actors who
can't learn lines. But
Drama Under the Influence, the latest addition to
The American Century Theater's "Reflections" series,
demonstrates the stage director's creative and substantive
role in communicating ideas, subtext, historical
commentary and emotions that would not register on the
audience without his efforts. When a director does this,
and good directors to it often and well, it is an act of
creation that uses the original work (or in the case of
this play,
works) as a springboard to a new and original
artistic statement.
Drama Under the Influence is a
collection of seven short plays by six female playwrights
who were active in the 1920s. Director Mazzola had long
been interested in exploring the essentially forgotten
works of early 20th
Century women writers as a source of enlightenment on
their times as well as a trove of still engaging plays
that never had a fair chance to succeed commercially. With
valuable suggestions and assistance from historian Deborah
Martinson, he found many suitable plays from the period. A
typical director would have just chosen the "best" that
could fill out an evening, arranged them to maximize set
change efficiency and casting economy, and put them on the
stage, each standing on its own with little relationship
to the others.
Most one-act evenings, sad to say, are constructed exactly
like that, with a unifying theme or title ("the short
plays of Tennessee Williams"; one-act comedies; stage
adaptations of short stories) and nothing more, creating
the dramatic equivalent of a musical variety show. Such
shows are diverting but somehow unsatisfying, like a
buffet dinner in which one's plate includes Beef
Wellington, garlic scampi and Waldorf salad.
Mazzola, however, took the necessary next step, beginning
the inherently scary process in which the director must
not only become an artist, but must take on the
responsibility of shaping another artist's creation, a
creation that was a personal statement, made in her unique
voice, of inspirations generated in her brain. If the
director destroys the essence of that creation, he buries
the last living spark from a remarkable mind that exists
no more. If he has integrity and respect for the artist,
he must find a way to preserve her message while employing
it in his own. This is a test of skill as well as
character. Many directors think nothing of warping and
distorting a playwright's work to fit their own agendas.
Think of all the feminist versions of
The Taming of the Shrew, complete with newly
written endings, Peter Sellars'
King Lear as a mundane modern dress play about
the homeless problem, and
The Importance of Being Ernest
with an all-male casts. No matter how clever or
well-executed such exercises are, they are examples of the
original material serving the director rather than the
other way around.
Drama Under the Influence
is something very different. The plays themselves are not
altered at all; each playwright would recognize hers and
find it free of interpretations and characterizations that
undermined its original intent. The plays do, however,
reinforce each other, and form a collage telling us much
more about what it meant to be a woman during the
Prohibition years than any one of the plays could. We see
courageous women, desperate women, mad women, angry women,
women who feel sisterhood with one another and women who
have a sense of humor. Launched into our evening's journey
by Sophie Treadwell's expressionistic dissection of the
disparate and incomplete roles society forces women to
play---daughter, lover, sex object, wife---we see the
fault lines and stresses of a gender in crisis and flux,
paraded before us in distinct styles and attitudes using a
remarkable emotional palette that no one playwright could
bring to the stage. Tying it together further are the
design elements: the set, the lights, and especially the
music, matching and contrasting feelings, smoothing
transitions, intensifying atmosphere.
The result is one play, not seven, and yet seven too. The
combined work has a different feel and message than any of
its parts, and yet it is consistent with all of them. They
are made stronger by their association with each other.
Drama Under the Influence
is a new play, fashioned by the director from old pieces
abandoned in the American theater's attic. And it is a
powerful example of the responsible way a skilled director
can make his own voice heard in harmony with the voices of
great artists of the past.
Author's Note: Director Mazzola did not have any notice
that this article was being written for the Audience
Guide. If he had, he almost certainly would have asked
that it not be included. But I feel that it is critical
for our audiences to appreciate the origins of this play
and his extraordinary role in bringing it to our stage,
and so, while extending him my apologies, the article
remains. JM.
~ Originally published in 2007 in the
Audience Guide
for TACT's production of
Drama Under the Influence.
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