The Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society  

    Delivered April 2, 2006, at

The Daylesford Theatre
11, Washington Street
Hamilton, HM 11, Bermuda

by
Kent Stetson
www.masterplayworks.com

On the occaision of the fifth annual

FAMOUS FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES FESTIVAL

    
Let me begin by thanking Famous for Fifteen Minutes producer Kelvin Hastings Smith for this invitation back to paradise.  It's been my experience, during frequent visits to Bermuda in the nineteen eighties and nineties, as guest of academic and  great man of Canadian Theatre, Bermudian Rhodes Scholar Arthur Motyer, that the accommodations in paradise are frequently superb.  This visit is no exception. I want to thank Ken and Margaret Hammond for their generous, congenial hospitality.  Villa Monticello will be recalled fondly in memory for its warmth, grace and beauty.

The entertainment in paradise is satisfying as well.  I'm grateful to The Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society, not only for bringing me here, but for providing such high quality entertainment . . . and the chance to come to understand something of the inner workings of this venerable theatrical institution.  

One of the many things I like about Mr.  K. Hastings Smith is his fondness for quotes.

Let me begin the formal part of this afternoons presentation with a quote from Herr Dokter Professor Sigmund Freud, early master of the human psyche:
        “Story-tellers are valuable allies, and their testimony is to be rated high, for they usually know many things between heaven and earth that our academic wisdom does not even dream of.   In psychic knowledge, indeed, they are far ahead of us . . . because they draw from sources that we have not yet made accessible for science.”

The scripts I read in advance of my arrival revealed an intriguing range of themes, as well as varied levels of experience and ability in the playwrights.  All had the potential to provide the first requirement of the theatre; first and foremost, the theatre must entertain.  All the play texts showed promise in this regard: in reality, none disappointed.  

The writing of plays is both an exercise of faith and an act of courage.  I extend sincere congratulations to the six playwrights produced by Famous for Fifteen Minutes, and my thanks for their willingness to share their hearts and souls with us over the last week.  

I think of American philosopher Joseph Campbell's evocation of the heroic in the human spirit.  The hero must lose his or her innocence in order to grow.  She must leave home and discover the world on her own, reshape her character according to the pleasures and tribulations she experiences along the way.  The hero must equip himself with the proper tools and equipment before setting out on the perilous journey toward enlightenment and self discovery.  The hero must seek advice from  those who have gone before.  The Hero must arm herself with weapons of both compassion and  humility if she is to survive to discover the Holy Grail.

Grail scholar Michael Bradley, in his book  The Holy Grail Across the Atlantic, places the old quest for excellence in a modern perspective:
    “Human will animated by love, tempered with compassion and guided by knowledge (that much maligned ‘Serpent’ in the Garden of Eden) finds itself obliged to take action that people recognize as ‘courageous’.  Armed with love, compassion and knowledge, the human will can transcend the stigma of birth... and lead the knights of light into a gathering darkness.  It can impel an individual to overcome the social parochialisms and cultural expectations that he or she may have inherited from birth, to create and defend new and more humane communities.  Armed with love, compassion and knowledge, one can cast off the cumbersome and crippling armor of religious dogma or political and economic dialectics to carve out, with supple and determined strokes, more appropriate social structures and a more rewarding human environment, using equally sharp edges of intellect and heart.  That is what knights and heroines of the Grail have always done.  That has been their job.  It still is, and anyone with a properly moulded will can join the elite company of the Grail because the battles, and the ramparts, are all around us.”

The Holy Grail of play writing,  Aristotle tells us,  is dramatic metaphor.  Dramatic metaphor differs from its prose and poetry cousins in this: dramatic metaphor is linked to the action and theme of the play.  Theme is revealed through action.  Action forces the theme.  Drama is action: action arises from conflict. The theme blooms when characters are forced to change.

By action I mean two things: the action on the stage, the physical movement, the blocking; and the more subtle form of action, which is dialogue.

Text action is like dominoes. Dialogue is not talk, not merely speech.  Every action has intrinsic, carefully considered  meaning.  Every line has purpose.  Every line has consequences.  Every line of dialogue forces the action of the play forward to the line that follows.

 The secret of writing, we are told, is re-writing.  Common wisdom in the contemporary theatre supports this claim.  It takes two years to write the six or seven drafts the modern, professionally produced two-act play requires before it's ready for the stage.  The journey from inspiration to first night is arduous.  That journey has a much higher possibility of success if inspiration is supported by knowledge.  The successful playwright has studied his or her craft.

We are told, in certain dubious books about writing, to write only what we know.  This seems to me like very bad advice indeed.  I know that I for one am immensely ignorant. Far better we should write what we can imagine.  Certainly, we need a base of knowledge relevant to the world of the play.  That's what libraries and the internet are for.  What we don't know we can learn.  The word playwright tells all.  Like ship wrights and wheel wrights, we are crafts persons before we are artists.  One wouldn't set out to build a house without a basic knowledge of several crafts.  There are great and not great books available on the making of plays.  Read them all, and take the advice of those which resonate within.

Once armed with the knowledge of what a play is and how it is made, the hero's task is to test herself, push beyond her limits, place herself in danger not only to grow, but to evolve.  Those who write to satisfy their own ego, to exercise — or exorcize — their own personal demons for simple relief, those who wish to dazzle with a play that screams me, me, me will not succeed.  The quest is useless, perhaps evil,  if the hero has no other goal other than to enrich him or herself.

The state of grace achieved by hard-won self knowledge must be shared to become fully valid.  The hero fights the battles common to all humanity; fear, cruelty, intolerance, self-aggrandisement at the cost of another's well-being.  She struggles internally, and in the outside world.  She takes what she has learned from her quest back to us, to the tribe.  She shares that most sacred of human commodities: knowledge.  We are all enriched.  Our lives expand.  We are better for the courageous actions undertaken by of one of us for the betterment of us all.

My friend and colleague in Prince Edward Island, director and educator Duncan McIntosh, who is known to many of you, tells us that a play performed without an audience is a rehearsal.  An audience without a play is a movie.  A play before a living, breathing audience is a communal exploration of the human spirit.

The playwright engages the most perilous spiritual quest in the theatre.  The  rewards are great.  The theatre, facilitated by the producer, presented by the actor, absorbed by the audience belongs to the playwright.  Here-in lies a quandary: nothing of lasting value is likely to be discovered in the treacherous interior landscape the playwright must explore unless the goal is to know oneself in order to help others.  

Whom must we help?  And why?

I arrived in Bermuda after three days in Halifax, where my career as a professional playwright commenced in the mid-nineteen eighties.  It was a time of honour, reverberation and echo.  At Nova Scotia's celebration of all things theatrical, The Merrit Awards, four of my colleagues, whose careers as theatre professionals had also spanned two or three decades, were similarly honoured with lifetime membership awards, presented by the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre.  

We looked at each other as though there had been some terrible mistake. Did this mean we had to quit?  Now . . . ?  In our mid to late fifties, just keel over and, in Longfellow's words,  “. . . fold our tents like the Arabs, and (sic)  as silently steal away?”  Wasn't it true, as we reassured ourselves when still in our forties, that writer's never retire?  At some point, in the far unimagined future, we simply run out of ink?

Despite these shudders of recognition, it was wonderful to be at the Merrits.  Often those who come before us remind us of what we desire.  Those who follow nip at our heels and show us what we already know.

The first night of readings was given over to us, playwrights in mid-stride, perhaps too soon honoured.  The second night was devoted to professional playwrights whose work had been nominated in best production and best playwright award categories.  They attracted a much larger crowd than we the night before.  They were all in their thirties.  It seemed we had been superceded by a cult, such was the self-congratulatory ranting and raving amongst this cadre of saucy young pop-tarts.  It didn't help that not a single one of them had come to our reading.  Mind you, the audience they attracted was much like them; young, edgy, raised in an era in which it seems impossible for any of us, young or old, to sustain a single thought for more than a few minutes before being interrupted by a cell phone, text message, chicken-little T.V. news report, or the black hole of a newspaper headline.  The world has become a twitchy place, and the human herd is spooked.

TV and Film have huge influences on young writers, with the result we see more and more film and television scripts on the stage masquerading as legitimate theatre.  The audience itself is conditioned to ninety minutes of prepackaged entertainment which stops at the climax, ignoring the most distinctive structural elements of traditional drama.  In this way, film and television demean the theatre.  Happily, theatre and theatre practice still set a bench mark, and nurture film and T.V.  How? The best dramatic writing for these modern media often comes from writers seasoned by the stage.

The creation of a piece of art of any significance requires that the artist live with the central thought of the work, the work's theme, for extended periods of uninterrupted time.  We must not only engage this single thought for days and weeks, we must nurture and expand it.  Here is where simple longevity, an attribute for which only the self-deluded take credit, comes into play.  Wisdom is not wasted on the old, any more than beauty is wasted on the young.

The same night at the Merrit awards, a great Canadian Actress was honoured for her contribution to Canadian Theatre.  Joan Orenstein, a post WW II war bride, came to Canada from Paddington, her blood a-boil with the great traditions of the British stage. She put her considerable gifts aside and raised five extraordinary daughters.  In her mid-forties, Joan stepped out of her kitchen and onto the stage.  Joan is a woman of extraordinary talent, in her prime as comfortable with Mother courage as the unschooled text of a meandering  new playwright.   I speak fondly here, and from memory.  Her interpretive power sent a thrill of fear and awe, and admiration, across the country, particularly in the hearts of actresses of a certain age who would suddenly be in competition with Joan for the greatest roles for mature women in the theatrical cannon.

Joan became blind in one eye as the result of an accident about fifteen years ago, then lost the sight in the other recently. Now completely blind, Joan inhabited an unfamiliar new landscape, a harsh one, fearful, perhaps,  as Gloucester, unsettled as King Lear, both of whom she might have played to perfection in her extraordinary career.  I seem to recall there is a Lear on her CV.
                        
At the awards ceremony, the spotlight fell upon her.  Her blind eyes drifted through the uneasy audience she had once transfixed, unaware all eyes were fixed upon hers.  As the kind words of the citation unrolled,  Joan —  now in her early eighties —  began, with the graceful hand movements of a temple dancer, to interpret what she heard.  It was discomfiting at first.  But she soon charmed us with the gestured telling of her own tale.  When the microphone was put in her hand by her artistic director son-in-law,  who had given the elegant tribute, she spoke the secret of her success.  “A theatre artist,” Joan told us,  her gaze searching the far distance above and beyond our vision, “ . . . must love her audience.”

We must love our audience.  Our love must be tough and complex, not cloying or patronizing.  Not self aggrandizing, but at once potent and humble.  “An artist . . . ”  in the words of Canadian Norman Bethune,
     “.  . .  must let himself go. He enters eagerly into the life of men. He becomes all men in himself. The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to rouse the sleepers, to shake the complacent pillars of the world. He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, shows the world its present and points the way to its new birth. He is at once the product and the preceptor of his time. After his passage we are troubled and made unsure of our too-easily-accepted realities. He makes uneasy the static, the set and the still. In a world terrified of change, he preaches revolution —  the principal of life. He is an agitator, a disturber of the peace —  quick, impatient, positive, restless and disquieting. He is the creative spirit working in the soul of man.”

This leads us away from the question “For whom do we write plays.” to our  second, more complex question.  “Why write plays at all?”  

In terms of unrewarding career choices, unrewarding in the financial sense, play writing is right up their with the writing of poetry.  There is good reason for this.  Norman Bethune is right; at our best, we can be very annoying.  That is, unless our propensity to preach (it seems to me,  many a playwright is simply a failed cleric) is overwhelmed by our need to entertain.

As I said earlier, the first law of the theatre is exactly that: to entertain.  I believe the second law of the theatre is to elevate the human spirit.  Tragedy, comedy, musical theatre . . . it doesn't matter the genre, the goal is the same.

Let's take a look at this years entires in the Famous for Fifteen Minutes festival to see if each of these plays left us better than they found of us. I assess them in no particular order.  To have been chosen for production from a field of thirty two plays is an honour in itself, and renders ranking moot.

Let's begin with Start.  This romantic comedy was a pleasure to read and ranked very high.  Start  is very much a product of its time.  The writing is smart and funny, and full of compassion.  Young Doug Jones observes his characters with insight and precision.

I referred earlier to these days of our lives as twitchy.  At the core of the argument of this excellent 'game boy' of a play, which is yet to be fully realized, is this conundrum; we can become paralysed by our own actions.  Ben is powerless.  He becomes stuck.  Feeling his life in free-fall around him, he exercises no self-willed discipline.

Instead,  he escapes to a virtual world where the only activity he can control, with the aid of his game pad,  is devoid of meaning.  His wild-haired roommate has had enough.  In a the beautifully performed character of Suzy, Alison Evans gives us a full tilt, nuanced performance.  Ben will clean up his act if she beats him at his own game.  A clever theatrical device ups the stakes.  The game characters become real, escape the game and become Ben and Suzy's surrogates.

Appropriately, Bentu and Suzitu hijack the play.  Start realizes the first three of Aristotle's five constrictive elements required in the full length play.  The play reaches its climax and the characters walk of arm in arm.  In a way, it realizes its climax twice. Though fulfilling the first law of theatre admirably (this was a very entertaining fifteen minutes) the Holy Grail of the Theatre evades Start.  A clever theatrical device does not a complete play make. The  play suffers the lack of a dénouement, and it's theme is left unresolved.  I long to see the couples, virtual and real,  interact.  Can you imagine sex between Sue and Bentu?  Ben and Suzitu?  And if game pad wires got crossed Ben and Bentu?  For that matter, in this production, the startlingly handsome and fit Bentu —  performed by half-naked Latvian eye-popper Oleg Razinnov — and almost anybody!?

I have no doubt we'll be hearing a lot more form playwright Doug Jones, being be-dazzled again and again by his acute theatrical sensibility, and enjoying a load of laughs along the way.  I await his mastery of dénouement and resolution, the two structural elements missing in Start.

Let me take a moment to talk about dénouement and resolution, and their critical function in the writing of a play.  
At the end of a short list of structural elements — introduction, development, climax, dénouement — comes resolution.  I like what the OED says about resolution:  The process by which a discord is made to pass into a concord. The answering of a question; the solving of  a doubt or difficulty. Also, the supplying of an answer.  There's also the definition which describes a chemical reaction: conversion into something else, or into a different form.  Two elements are combined to produce a third.  This new component is the most important in theatre.  It is dramatic metaphor.

This definition makes the most sense to me in terms of drama.  Two states of being combine to produce a third.  The resolution of a play is not about tying up loose ends.  Nor is a play best left hanging, its theme unsatisfactorily explored, its personages incomplete shadows. The resolution is a blossoming, an opening up, the evocation of a new state of affairs in a world redefined by the play's theme, then irrevocably altered by the play's climax.

Dénouement is described as the unravelling of the complications of the plot.  The untying of a knot — the French word being noeud. To me, it also has the sense of falling away.  The lovely writing in Kim Dismont Robinson's Hey Sister  is all about dénouement.  A friendship dissolves for an undramatic reason; simple negligence.  The understated theme of the play is betrayal.  In a longer version, one imagines the possible plot complications in which the friends don't simply drift apart, but were driven apart.  What if their relationship was rent asunder by the actions of one against the other?   What, I wonder, if this talented writer had raised the stakes from the beginning?  Betrayal, deceit, the purposeful misleading of another for one's own gain; here is a theme and motifs that would certainly intensify the climax.  The play, which is essentially extended dénouement, would claim and defend a higher moral territory.

Hey Sister is a play with a social conscience.  Elements of agit-prop agitate its interior.  Hey Sister is political and humane.  Kim Dismont Robinson is a writer with a terrific range of feeling and emotion, an elegant writer, an iron fist in a velvet glove.  I look forward to seeing more of her work.
                                                
He Did it Again repeatedly stirred great recognition and pity in the audience.  This distressing  revenge play comes close to classical tragedy in its tone and voice.  Zawditu Maryam is a passionate, careful observer of her split character's tortured interior landscape.  Revenge, the central theme, is impelled by a string of brutal betrayals.  Once redeemed, then destroyed again by circumstances beyond her control, one feels the hands of  unkind gods acting against the heroine.

In a certain way, the play circles around its climax for a very long time.  At first glance, especially on the page, it feels as though   He Did it Again is all climax, without resolution or dénouement.  On reflection, it is seen that this excellent little play does resolve.  Revenge is exacted when this extremely talented young  playwright forces her character to jump directly from climax to resolution, without the benefit of dénouement.  One would have appreciated more knowledge of the main character's feelings in regard to her actions.  

It is in the area of self -reflection that the dénouement serves the playwright, and allows for flights of self revelatory passion and great poetry.  That being said, one of the chief weapons in the questing hero's arsenal is courage.  Here is an extraordinarily gifted playwright of great courage.  

I'm delighted to hear that Zawdi stuck to her guns in a rehearsal process which became somewhat contentious.  Zwadi, I'm told, will not be argued out of her rightful place as the owner of the material she writes. Everyone is interested in being a playwright, it seems, when rehearsal starts.  It works best when people realize there is only one playwright in the room.  That being said, there is a great deal to be learned from one's colleagues, if the observations are delivered and received with grace and kindness.   Even if a playwright can't articulate, with a good argument, why the words on the page are the only possible words in the only possible order, her instinct must be trusted and respected.   

Only the playwright, the legal owner of his or her words, has the right to decide the content, form and style of the play.

'Listers and Pandora's Drawers would have benefited from several readings and rigorous re-writes.  There is no difference in the structural elements required to construct comedy and tragedy. Tragedy, it is said, stares, while comedy glances away at the first opportunity, then changes the subject.  It is also said that comedy happens to someone else, but tragedy happens to you. After hearing both of these 'situation' plays read in succeeding drafts, the playwrights would have discovered essential  truths  which would have lifted the work above the level of television sitcom and simple sex farce.  Comedy should be a little dangerous.  The stakes need to be very high.  But most of all, the characters in comedy must be as complex and as carefully drawn as those in the highest tragedy.

In 1944, British actress Athena Seyler crafted a clever little book — actually an exchange of letters with an aspiring young writer— called The Craft of Comedy: “Comedy,” she told him,
    “ is the sparkle on the water, the gay surface, the glint of sunlight, not the depths underneath. But note: the waters must run deep. . . Comedy must be founded on truth and on an understanding of the real value of a character before it can pick out the high-lights. It is only when one understands a person that one can laugh at him.”

This brings us to the 2006 Famous for Fifteen Minutes festival's winning play.  Margie Harriott's The Art Lesson is an elegant piece of writing from an accomplished poet experimenting for the first time in a new genre.  In this lesson, through projection and reflection, the characters learn more about the truth of their own lives, past and present, than art.  The unstated theme unfolds in The Art Lesson.  We are led by a confident playwright through her intricate maze.  As the protagonist experiences the power of David Hockney's painting, Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy, which stimulates in her a journey to self knowledge, the ghostly antagonist is forced to come to grips with his dissolute past, when he and his spouse, first owners of the painting, parted decades ago.  The realities of the characters are revealed in point and counterpoint: the characters,  moving in opposite directions, come together none-the-less.  We come to understand The Woman's current situation, and her psychic and perhaps physical peril through the revelation of Ossie's tragic past.

I said last night in my brief remarks to Margie that I thought of all the plays I had seen, The Art Lesson was the most complete, and urged her to leave it alone.  After all, common wisdom holds that plays, like most works of art, are never completed.  At some point they are merely abandoned.  Knowing when to stop is a great challenge to all artists.  Happily we have production dates to force our noses from the page.

Last night I had second thoughts about my comments.  What might happen, I wondered as I drifted off last night toward fantasies of a hunky video game character doing unspeakable thing to his colleagues and to me, if Ossie and the Woman actually met?  Drama, after all, arises when opposing forces conflict.

Eric Bentley tells us the playwright is a perverse traffic cop: instead of preventing accidents, he beckons cars into collision.  

From conflict, action arises, which promotes more conflict.  Alps on Alps arise.  The stakes are raised until the play bursts open at the carefully stitched seams; dramatic metaphor unfolds.

The theme of  The Art Lesson is loneliness.  A major motif is isolation. Perhaps it is better Ossie and the Woman remain isolated, with only one character permitted to know the thoughts of the other.  Dramatic irony, when the audience knows something of importance the other character or characters do not,  is a great tool in the hands of a sophisticated playwright.  Nothing welcomes an audience into the playwrights confidence more than a shared secret.  

In many ways, The Art Lesson is a tiny, perfect play.  It is my urge to see more form this writer, plays with larger more elaborate plots, bigger stories, characters with whom I can engage for a couple of hours rather than fifteen minutes.

With The Art Lesson, Margie Harriott demonstrates she is a playwright as well as an accomplished poet.  I know of no one, other than Shakespeare, who understood the relationship of poetry to drama better than T. S. Eliot.   His meditations on the ephemeral  nature of creation are instructive and, to a degree, cautionary.  “There are only hints and guesses,” he tells us in The Four Quartets.  “Hints followed by guesses.  The rest is prayer, observance and discipline, thought and action.”

A final word to playwrights: the play is yours.  Not only are you its owner, but while you are alive, you are its legal guardian and chief  care giver.  

Lots of people have lots of ideas about what they would do had they written your play.  The fact of the matter is, they didn't.  Keep your play close, hold it dear, make sure its strong and safe, then give it to the people who really need it: the audience.  

Give them your very best.  Love them, and they will love your work.

Thank you for your time and attention . . . and a swell time in Paradise.

E. Kent Stetson,
The Cottage, Villa Monticello        
Smith's Parish, Bermuda