There is nothing more unnerving than letting go of what you’ve created. IFP workshops are one thing — accepting criticism, listening attentively as your peers tell you, “It’s too melodramatic” or “You could really shorten this” — but watching a production of your own play? That’s a whole new precipice of stress.
The first time I wrote a play, I was eight. I wanted to write about princesses. There was a Child’s Play contest at school. It was the perfect opportunity for my princess saga to be appreciated. And so I wrote up twelve pages of strange, plot hole-ridden fantasy and submitted it to the principal’s office with all twenty of my fingers and toes delicately crossed. But alas. It didn’t win. My first fall from artistic grace. Given I’d written it in the span of an hour, I probably should’ve known.
The second time I wrote a play was slightly more lucrative. I was fourteen and a sophomore in high school. (I’ve always been the baby of my class.) There was another contest, the Delaware Young Playwrights Festival, which was back up and running after a three-year hiatus.
I didn’t know much about what it meant, what a “playwriting festival” was or what I could expect if I won, but I knew that I’d lost a similar contest six years in the past, with a princess play so ridiculous it made me shudder to remember, and I wanted something resembling redemption. So I collected my haphazard thoughts into a one-act play inspired by my sister and the mental illness that stirred up my childhood confusion. I sent it in with rocks in my stomach.
Three months later and I’d nearly forgotten it completely. But then — I got it. I got it?!
When I saw the email labelled “Congratulations!” it took me four minutes to process. And then I read on: “Two months of mandatory workshopping to adapt it for its final stage performance.
What? Performance?
In the end, “final stage performance” turned out to be something I could get behind. Something I truly desired. And for weeks I anticipated it with all the eagerness of that princess-obsessed eight-year-old diva. It was all I could talk about at the dinner table, in Spanish class and to my luckily and quite patient driver’s ed instructor. I was a broken record with the words “play,” “stage,” “professional” and especially, “mineminemineminemine.” I was one of those greedy-sounding seagulls from Finding Nemo, and I was insatiable.
Fortunately, the performance came and shut me up. I watched in the audience with those familiar rocks rattling in my stomach, looking at my parents out of the corner of my eye. Did they like it? Were they laughing? Oh, shoot, why aren’t they laughing? But when curtain call came and I heard applause reverberating throughout the theater, I calmed. This was good.
Watching my play be performed was incredible, and being congratulated and complimented by the audience was even better. That being said, it’s still scary. And strange. Regardless of how emphatically the actors spoke their lines or how smoothly the technical aspects fit together, there was always something in the back of my mind telling me it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t exactly what I imagined when I first slammed my keys on my laptop and watched a plot come together. Yet that was a doubt I had to accept.
In the Delaware Young Playwrights Festival, the writer’s process works like this: You write a play, you get selected as a finalist, you workshop and edit and adapt to criticisms and then suddenly, it’s out of your hands. You, the writer, take a step back and let the directors, producers, actors and tech crew work with your words in the weeks leading up to the performance. They are the ones, ultimately, who have final say over the finished play.
It was tough for me to get accustomed to this lack of supervision. I was a finalist for the Delaware Young Playwrights Festival for the next two years of high school after that, and I loved it. I cherished the art of creation and the fun of collaboration and the thrill of the showcase, but it never got any easier to lose control. Still, it was worth it.
This past weekend I lived it again. It was the Witness Theater Showcase — four new student-written plays — and I had written one of them. I sat in the audience two days in a row, merely a spectator, and felt the familiar rocks settling in my stomach. I heard my friends rave about the other plays, I felt the questions rise up (Did they like them better? Did they like mine at all?), but I stopped. I refocused. I listened to the applause, watched the lights go down on the stage, and remembered, again — this is worth it.
