This festival underscores how the American theater in general employs a small circle of writers endorsed by “the network,” writers who are well entrenched in the national pipeline. This applies even to SCR’s “new generation,” such as Julie Marie Myatt and David Wiener. Myatt’s and Wiener’s plays each received full productions as part of the festival. Myatt’s My Wandering Boyconcerns the disappearance of a young man and its effect on the people he left behind. Since the eponymous subject never appears, and the play’s culminating event occurs before the curtain rises, the play’s mystery depends entirely on the power of its monologues and interviews, which are strikingly prosaic (compared with Margulies’ tour-de-force soliloquies in Shipwrecked!).Director Bill Rauch tries to compensate for the absence of drama with Christopher Acebo’s Hockneyesque set, which places couches and lamps against a looming desert backdrop, and with the ingratiating accompaniment of a Dobro guitar, which suffocates the stage in “atmosphere.”
I’m reluctant to condemn the clichés in Wiener’s saga of moral bankruptcy in Hollywood, System Wonderland, since I was tipped off (and not by the author) that the play was completely rewritten before it reached the stage. Suffice it to say that Wiener’s linguistic and theatrical skills are in full bloom, even if his play isn’t.
Whose play is it anyway? Charlayne Woodard and Gregory Itzin in Shipwrecked! (Photos by Henry DiRocco/SCR)
Aiming to travel: My Wandering Boy
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Perhaps what the theater needs is a standard of ethics similar to that used by newspapers to protect their integrity — a firewall between the publishing side, with its interests in marketing, and the editorial camp. What’s happening in these theaters is similar to a newspaper publisher stepping in — with the newspaper chain in mind — and consulting on the content of articles before they’re even completed. In newspapers, this would be considered an outrageous intrusion upon editorial liberty. Obviously, marketing interests still have subtle influences over the content of newspapers, but imagine what it would be like if that firewall were removed.
One of the healthier new-play-development scenarios I observed occurred at the Mark Taper Forum, where Glore was serving as dramaturge. Glore, with director Lisa Peterson, helped develop Richard Montoya’s Water and Power, while the theater’s artistic director, Michael Ritchie, removed himself from the process. Ritchie gave himself one role: He could decide whether to present the play or not. Marketing concerns were largely kept out of the process of developing ?the play.
After viewing five of the seven new works at the Pacific Playwrights Festival, I actually have little argument with the plays on display. My complaint is for the braver work that’s being left behind, because the reasons for that neglect are being echoed in a hundred more instances around the country, while our theater’s relevance as an art form hangs in the balance.
