I saw myself as having failed as a novelist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is what I did with my so-called spare time when I lived in the New York City Metropolitan area, first in Brooklyn and then in central New Jersey. Hence I eliminated fiction as a possibility. What else was left for a failed novelist and a failed poet, but writing plays? That’s how I reasoned out my situation in the mid 1980s.
Eliminated Screen Writing
By the way, I also eliminated screen writing from consideration because I was not living in California and had no relationships with anyone in the movie business. From what I had read in writers magazines and been told by people who struck me as authoritative on the subject, no one made it as screen writer without Southern California contacts, and I didn’t have any.
And so in the mid 1980s I began writing a play. It was about the big tragedy in my life when I was growing up, namely the failure of a family business. Appropriately I named it “The Business.” “The Business” might never have found its way to the stage had it not been for a sympathetic director named Benny Blumenthal who agreed to work with me to get it stage ready and to direct the production. I had been introduced to Benny by a co-worker of mine at Comsat, the satellite communications company, named Anne Armentrout who was using her spare time to run the theatre program at the church.
Arlington County Becomes Sponsor
And so my spotty career in the theatre was launched. The next big event in my theatre history occurred in 1990 when I was able to team up with the Arlington County Parks and Recreation Department to launch a theatre devoted to putting on new works. This seeming act of altruism—creating a means of launching new plays from, for the most part, new playwrights—was, like almost all acts of altruism, full of self interest. My main intention was to create opportunities for myself as a playwright.
As the sponsor of New Works Theatre, Arlington County provided the venue for the production of plays, and it provided important items like chairs, curtains and lights. Even more important, the department was a source of funding for such things as advertising, set construction and props for each production.
Playwright Submissions
To tap into sources for new plays, New Works had only to announce that it was in business with its address for submissions, and the scripts started coming in. I soon found that the greater Washington DC area had more fellow playwrights in it than I ever imagined. To review the submissions, we set up what we called our Artistic Committee consisting of a team of readers, drawn mainly from a community where we once had lived called Holmes Run Acres in Fairfax County.
Wife Harriet assumed leadership of the committee in the beginning, and soon after she would play an important role in our productions by working backstage.
Play Introduction Methods
New Works Theatre employed a variety of production methods to bring its new plays to the attention of the public. In public readings, the actors sat in chairs on the stage and read the parts out loud to the audience. No attempt to act out the parts was made. The main beneficiary of this technique was supposed to be the playwright. He or she could hear how the dialogue sounded and get inspired to make the appropriate changes to improve the work for production.
The next step in the new plays world was called the staged reading. This approach was supposed to help not just the playwright but the production team—director and lighting, sound, sound and props designer, and stage manager. In the staged reading, the actors have more familiarity with their parts than in the public reading, and go through the motions of their character presentation at least in a limited way. Finally, of course, is the full production.
Hold Discussions With Audience
One of the interesting things we did at New Works Theatre was to hold discussions with the audience after a production, whether a simple reading, staged reading or full production. Usually I led these discussions, and we would talk about the central theme of the work as well as whether the audience felt the playwright had been successful and whether the production was effective or not in getting these ideas across.
As I recall, the second full production of New Works Theatre was a play called “The Hot Rocks Rebellion” by this writer. This full length work was about a father and son who end up working in the same fast food restaurant during an economic downturn not unlike the one we are going through today. I had a lot of pleasure writing “Hot Rocks” and being involved with its production, but I was not to have the pleasure of another full length production of my own work during the lifetime of New Works, which came to an end in 1995.
Artist In Search of Home
A short one-act play I wrote called “The Artist in Search of a Home” was produced by New Works as part of a fund raising event, but that was the extent of New Works Theatre’s benefits for the play writing career of Stephen Alan Saft. The duties of running the theatre—the need, for example, of near constant fund raising—became overwhelming. Besides the demands of my real job were starting to become significant. I was then working for George Washington University and was about to undergo a major career shift. My job as manager of marketing for the Division of Continuing Education would soon be terminated, and I would be casting about for something else to do to keep myself on the payroll at the university.
In a future posting to Mind Check, I may get into how I came to start the university’s Interactive Multimedia Program, which is what I did next at George Washington University, but this posting is about how I, a struggling poet, came to get involved with theatre. My purpose in writing it in the first place is to serve as a preamble to an account of why in 2009, many years after my last involvement with theatre and play writing I now find myself writing a play again.
A Sequel to Murdoch
Soon after publishing my first book of 2008, entitled “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat,” I was struck with the fact that by no means had I said everything I wanted to say and needed to be said about this near buffoon Murdoch McLoon and what he saw as his purpose in life with regard to the environment and the world-wide problems of hunger and poverty. We were then in the midst of the 2008 election campaign and the issue of what the individual person could do about these problems as inspired by the example and powerful rhetoric of Barack Obama weighed on my mind.
The more I thought about these issues the more I felt moved to write a sequel to “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat.” The new work would pick up from where the existing book left off. Murdoch would realize that a windmill boat could not be an answer to an overdependence on oil, that for one thing whatever solution might be available in technology had to be useful on land.
Huge in Scope
As I worked on it, the concept for the sequel became huge in scope involving seven different parts of the world, each with its own local problems as well as its individual spin on the environmental issue. I selected Homer as the narrator for the story, the father of the epic poetic story in the West—specifically The Iliad and The Odyssey. Soon I became overwhelmed by the grandiosity of my concept. How could I ever write such a thing and finish it in my lifetime? Should I abandon the whole idea as just not doable?
It was then that I remembered the play writing form. The modern play—
and screen play for that matter—has the need for economy of words built into it. If I could transform the new work into a producible work for the theatre, I would have to compress it. Much of my original grand concept would have to be eliminated, and what was dramatic in that original concept would have to be enhanced and brought front and center. At the same time, I would have to do what has to be done with works meant to be performed. I would have to recast the story as a story told by convincing characters through dialogue.
At this writing, the sequel as play is developing nicely, and I hope to find a theatre that will work with me to put it on the stage. That will not be easy. But I will keep at it. At the same time, I would like to publish it in book form for those who got interested in Murdoch in the first book about him and wonder what happened to him and don’t want to wait until the sequel about him gets produced in his or her area. Murdoch has had a lot of exciting adventures since the end of “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat,” and the reader will find it interesting, even gripping, to find out what became of him.
Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website. You can call the publisher directly at 888-795-4274 ext. 7876 or use the publisher’s website Xlibris.com.
Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft
