Most playwrights tend to finish a script, then find actors to match the characters on the page. Steve Moulds, not so much. The third-year fellow at the Michener Center for Writers likes to cast the play first, then develop the script around those specific actors. For his latest effort, Emergency Prom, receiving its premiere this week from the University of Texas’ Department of Theatre & Dance, Moulds has tailored the material to all 18 actors. How that affected his writing process and shaped this comedy of a young man’s attempt to recover from a disastrous school dance by staging a do-over was the focus of this interview with the Chronicle.
Austin Chronicle: How did writing for specific actors change your process as a playwright?
Steve Moulds: I’ve actually written four other plays in this manner, which is one of the reasons I felt confident proposing this show to the department. But the thing that’s different about this kind of process is that you have the enormous resource of the actors’ voices when you write. You get to know the actors as people – their conversational rhythms, their instinctual responses to conflict – and the characters end up having the actors’ psychological fingerprints all over them. Most of the time, the characters start as broad archetypes, and in the process of being written for particular people, they become specific human beings.
AC: Did writing for specific actors change the play’s direction at all?
SM: The thing about knowing your actors as you’re writing is that they’re all jockeying for position in your mind. You want to give everyone a good role, a meaningful part to play, and at the very least, a solid punch line or moment. Characters that have smaller roles in the first act end up being huge parts of the second. This is the largest ensemble I’ve ever written for – by a factor of three, actually – and I wanted to make sure every character is crucial to the story. A lot of that desire came from knowing all the actors and wanting to do justice to each individual’s talents.
AC: Are any of the actors’ personal prom experiences informing the play?
SM: I don’t want to give away the joke, but the theme of the emergency prom comes directly from the life of one of our actors. Little biographical details crop up here and there, but not in such a way that you’d think they were real. In general, though, the stories come more out of common themes and motifs of everyone’s proms and less out of particular experiences. I mean, let’s be honest: One person’s getting drunk at prom story doesn’t differ too much from anyone else’s.
AC: What personal demon are you exorcising by allowing your characters a prom do-over?
SM: No personal demon – although one of the characters has a story that is almost exactly my actual prom. No, I enjoyed my prom quite a bit. But expectation and disappointment are part of pretty much every special event that you know in advance is going to happen, so prom works as a container for lots of characters with lots of different problems.
Emergency Prom runs Dec. 2-4, Thursday-Saturday, 8pm, in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre of the Winship Drama Building, 23rd & San Jacinto. For more information, visit www.finearts.utexas.edu.
This article appears in December 3 • 2010.