School for Scripts

illustration by Robert Faires

If you trace any piece of theatre to its beginnings, you
will almost always stumble upon a furiously scribbling little figure hunched
over a desk. Without the playwright, there would be no action for the director,
no setting for the designers, and no subtext for the critics. Actors would be
left onstage with their mouths agape, wondering how they ever got onstage in
the first place. A script is the engine that drives the production, the
foundation for the art that evolves.

Playwriting is not like fiction or poetry; the work is not meant simply to
lie dormant upon a piece of paper. It needs to be spoken aloud — and by
someone other than the playwright in the middle of his or her living room. It’s
important not only to make the play live, but to help the author learn how well
the work works. Apart from the isolated workshop, your average playwright does
not get the chance to hear quality feedback from other theatre artists. If the
play does not immediately catch an artistic director’s eye, it can languish in
a drawer somewhere and the playwright will never know why it’s not being
produced.

Enter the MFA program. Graduate school is able to produce a playwright’s work,
satisfying that desire to see one’s work on stage, and to teach a writer the
tools necessary to craft a fine play, the nuts and bolts of creating vivid
action, detailed dialogue, and pervasive themes. It also exposes our burgeoning
playwright to other playwrights whose work may diverge wildly from what he or
she is trying to produce. David Cohen is one of the leading forces in the
development of the Texas Center for Writers (TCW) and head of the University of
Texas’ playwriting program, which is showcasing the work of its student
dramatists in a UT Festival of New Plays this week. Cohen believes that
graduate school can build a better playwright, one with sharpened skills and
several manuscripts ready for production.

“It basically allows for a larger chance of having three relatively
unpressured years to work as a writer before you have the big pressures of
earning a living,” Cohen says. “It also, more importantly, allows a student to
be a part of a community of writers that are supportive as well as provides
opportunities and development that the student wouldn’t normally have.”

Two different programs in playwriting are offered by UT. The Department of
Theatre & Dance program offers a master’s degree in playwriting. The
primary focus for the student is becoming a professional playwright, with the
student’s final project being a script that must be produced either on the UT
campus or in an approved theatre. TCW, founded in 1989 to be a center for all
creative writing programs on campus, offers an MFA in writing. Courses in
playwriting, screenwriting, fiction, and poetry are taught by faculty from the
English, Theatre & Dance, and Radio-Television-Film departments. A TCW
playwriting student takes classes with Theatre & Dance Department students,
but the student’s focus is broader. In fact, to be eligible for TCW’s program,
a candidate must show competence in at least two areas.

Students in the TCW program are automatically offered a Michener scholarship,
a kind of Holy Grail for those who want an MFA. The Michener is, essentially, a
free ride through graduate school — it pays the student’s tuition and required
fees and provides a stipend that will cover modest living expenses. Michener
departmental scholarships are also offered to some students in the MFA
playwriting program and MA programs in poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.

Of course, now every would-be writing student is frantically trying to figure
out where to sign up for what seems like a very cushy offer. But the
department’s needs are very specific, and it has high standards for degree
candidates. “We’re looking for a talent and a promise that this person will
have a professional career as a writer,” says Cohen. “We’re looking for the
best writers.”

And before all those aspiring writers pack their bags, they should realize the
odds of getting into this highly selective program. Out of 50-100 applicants
per year, the Theatre & Dance Department typically takes only two or three
students. This year, TCW did not accept any writers who were primarily
playwrights.

“I had a student come last year and say, `You’re the only program I’m applying
to,'” Cohen relates. “I said, `No. Don’t you dare do that to yourself. You may
be the best playwright in America, but I may not be able to accept you.’

“The reason we keep our playwriting program so limited is to offer as much
production opportunity as we can. To me, that’s the hallmark of a good
playwriting program,” Cohen adds.

Most playwrights who are accepted to the program have been produced before or
have gobs of previous writing experience and are looking to further their
development as writers. Robert Alan Ford, a second-year student in the TCW
program — his play Manhattan Transaction is being produced in the
Festival of New Plays — was living in New York and writing corporate brochures
and speeches prior to his move to Austin. While he was making a living from
that kind of writing, it wasn’t what he was looking for. Ford came back to
school “not so much for the degree as for the opportunity to work in a
community of writers and in a place where writing in general was respected —
not just playwriting per se, but good writing as an overarching concept.”

Playwright Jason Groce, whose Stealing Fire will also be produced in
the festival, mentions that his primary reason for coming to UT to get an MFA
“is because it’s three years, and it does help put off the real world. The
secondary reason is because the MFA here has a greater emphasis on workshops
and creative work, and while I like my other classes, I am able to divide my
time nicely between my creative and my academic work.”

John Walch, now in his third year in the Theatre & Dance department
program — his play Craving Gravy is set for a full production by the
department in the spring — came back to school after supporting his writing
habit by doing technical theatre work as a stage manager, props master, and
carpenter. Speaking like a man whose carpentry experience has colored his
thinking, Walch says he wanted to return to school to discover “which tools to
access when I am not communicating, and to see what I could do if I devoted
time to learning the craft” of playwriting.

While playwrights may come to school for different reasons, they all find one
approach to learning their craft when they arrive at UT. Cohen believes in
“creating a workshop where people can explore their work and their voice in a
protective and supportive way. Half the time in my workshop is spent doing what
I call etudes, specific exercises designed to free the writer to work on one
aspect of the play. The rest of the time is spent on giving informed feedback
on longer pieces of work.”

Feedback may be one of the most valuable aspects of an MFA program. One forum
for feedback at UT is the weekly reading of new scripts in the Lab Theatre.
These chamber readings, held every Monday night, allow playwrights to hear
their scripts and most recent drafts of scripts given voice by actors instead
of the other playwriting students. Talkbacks, moderated by Cohen, are open to
the community so the playwrights can hear comments about their work from a
range of interested audience members: their peers, other students in the
department, faculty members, or anyone else who has come to the reading.

The readings also provide opportunities for the playwright to hear the work of
his or her peers. “Listening to other people’s plays is just as important as
getting feedback on my own,” says Groce. Hearing the solutions that others have
come up with for a problem you may be having or being exposed to another style
of writing may help inform your own struggles with the script you are currently
developing.

To Cohen, this diversity of voices within the Winship Drama Building’s walls
is one of the strengths of the UT program. “We don’t have a house style. So
that means the students that we get are working in often very different styles.
I think that helps create a stronger group of writers because people are having
to confront choices other playwrights are making and decide how it fits in with
their own work,” says Cohen.

Having to defend his choices to other playwrights who approach writing in
different ways has been helpful to Walch. “Rejections aren’t as devastating
because I think the play works and can articulate why,” he explains.

Ford’s experience is similar: “I feel like I begin to grasp the essentials of
making a play work — the kind of play that I myself enjoy, at any rate —
characters with stakes, stakes, stakes, motivation, needs, desperate
circumstances. There is less and less mystery to the craft.”

Production experience also helps to demystify the creation of a well-written
script. In addition to the Monday night readings, the playwrights are able to
mount bare-bones productions of their scripts during the Lab Theatre season.
During his first year at UT, Groce had two of his full-length plays read and
two of his one-acts staged in the space. Second-year students are expected to
take part in the Festival of New Plays, in which short scripts are given full
productions with directors and dramaturgs who are encouraged to give feedback
to the playwright during rehearsals.

Ultimately, the experience of obtaining an MFA in playwriting seems to be a
valuable one for the playwrights and for the members of the audience who
appreciate a well-crafted script. With sufficient financial support, production
experience, and feedback, these theatre artists are able to spend three years
concentrating on perfecting their craft. “Considering the time I’ve had and the
support I’ve been given here for what will be three years, ” says Groce, “I
wouldn’t care if they didn’t give me a degree at all.”

But these MFA programs do give you a degree and some career counseling as
well. Their instructors are working playwrights, artists who have been there
and can share practical career tips with the students. Cohen has had work
produced on Broadway and has written for television and feature films. Among
the guest instructors are folks most playwrights would never be able to connect
with and learn from outside of academia, such as Robert Schenkkan, the
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Kentucky Cycle; Constance Congdon,
author of Tales of the Lost Formicans; and, most recently, Terry
O’Reilly of Mabou Mines.

The programs also can help students secure internships at such theatres as
the Alley in Houston, the Goodman in Chicago, and the Zachary Scott Theatre
Center, Live Oak Theatre, and Capitol City Playhouse locally. Michener fellow
Emily Cicchini had her play Becoming Bront� produced at Cap City
and worked as the theatre’s literary manager and associate artistic director.
TCW graduate Amparo Garcia had her thesis play Under a Western Sky developed at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California and will
see it produced off-Broadway by INTAR this coming spring.

“Hopefully, by the time our playwriting students leave here, they have a sense
of where they might connect,” Cohen says. “Some people move to Seattle to work
with pre-existing connections, some go to New York, some to Chicago, and some
stay right here in Austin and start their own theatres. And why not?”

Perhaps the only con of an MFA playwriting program is that completion in no
way guarantees future productions of one’s plays. The degree may help a
struggling playwright more in securing a teaching job than getting a reading
from a theatre. Like most other aspects of theatre — or life — talent and
skill do not automatically create a demand for your work, even when you have
honed them both through years of concentrated study.

“I think success for a playwright is contentment with writing plays that can
be staged and find an audience regardless of the financial compensation,” Cohen
says. “It’s an elusive thing.

“I still marvel that people want to be playwrights; I figure people are
playwrights because they can’t really imagine doing anything else.”

Adrienne Martini reviews theatre regularly for the Chronicle.

This article appears in November 22 • 1996 and November 22 • 1996 (Cover).