Authors! Authors!

Increasingly, American stages are rife with collaborative plays authored by a motley of writers
by Jonathan Shandell

Wonderful chaos. That's a perfect way to describe the process." So says Chiori Miyagawa, looking back on The Antigone Project—an October 2004 Off Broadway production of Women's Project that brought together five playwrights (Tanya Barfield, Karen Hartman, Miyagawa, Lynn Nottage and Caridad Svich) and five directors (Annie Dorsen, Dana Iris Harrel, Anne Kauffman, Barbara Rubin and Liesl Tommy) for a quintet of short adaptations of Sophocles' Antigone. What was wonderful? "The collaborative model worked well because we came together as a community of artists. It's nice not to be alone in the world. Playwrights, especially, want to feel connected to other playwrights." Why chaotic? "A collaborative form is messier than working with one author. Collaboration can be provocative. Something better, deeper and more exciting can emerge from a fusion of ideas. But it is bound to be messy."

The provocative mess of collaborative playwriting is a new and growing presence on American stages. Our theatre has known plenty of playwriting pairs over the years: Kaufman and Hart, Shepard and Chaikin, and their like. We've also seen performing ensembles like the Living Theatre and Mabou Mines forge new theatrical works through collaboration. Short-play festivals, one-time-only benefit productions and other special events often boast long rosters of contributors. But now as never before, larger groups of writers—four, six, even nine at a time—are converging to write thematically and theatrically integrated full-length plays. Call it a newfound dramatic revival of the Surrealist mantra, "Poetry must be made by all and not by one."

Surrealists of 1920s Paris devised exercises like "The Exquisite Corpse"—a parlor game in which poets took turns adding to a collective text through wild free-association—to transcend the constraints of a postwar society fragmented by rising industrialization and hamstrung by rationalist thought. In a 21st-century America overrun by technology and electronic modes of communication, collaborative experiments are natural for the stage: one of the few interpersonal forums we have left.

For wordsmiths logging hours behind computer screens, collaborative projects serve as a social release. "Writing can be a very isolating profession," says Polly Carl, producing artistic director of the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and architect of another recent collaborative project, Face Value. "Playwrights are yearning to connect with other writers, to interact creatively, to bring their voices together." But the rise in collaborative drama goes beyond seeking a cure for authorial loneliness. The genre responds to deep-seated anxieties felt throughout post-9/11 America. Collaborative dramas are by nature anti-authoritarian, breaking apart the power that a single "Author-God" (to use Roland Barthes's term) can wield over artists and audiences. With the tyranny of mono-authorship diffused, a collaborative play embraces a multiplicity of voices and social perspectives within the same work—and potentially becomes an antidote to a national discourse too often hijacked by fear and inimical to meaningful dialogue. "Diversity of thought should be the center of any successfully pluralistic society," says Jack Reuler, managing artistic director of Minneapolis's Mixed Blood Theatre Company. "A collaborative form embodies that ideal."

Reuler and his company put the ideal into practice with the February 2004 production of Bill of (W)rights. Developed in partnership with the Guthrie Theater and its literary manager Michael Bigelow Dixon, the work unites nine playwrights—Janet Allard, Rebecca Gilman, Jeffrey Hatcher, Syl Jones, Gavin Lawrence, Melanie Marnich, Jane Martin, Kelly Stuart and Elizabeth Wong—who penned eight-minute scenes exploring the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution. These writers adopted a range of strategies for dealing with their chosen provisions. Some looked directly at the Bill's definitions of governmental authority; Martin's The Billet, for example, updates the Third Amendment's prohibition against quartering soldiers in private homes by imagining the assignment of armed "personal terrorist-repel personnel" within a suburban house. Other sketches riff more freely on an idea; Jones's Sacrament dramatizes freedom of religion not by debating public policy issues but by depicting a private confrontation between a pedophile priest and one of his victims. The 10 parts of Bill of (W)rights add up to a frenzied yet captivating dramatic hodgepodge. By express design, this is anything but a tidy exploration of American democracy in the vein of Inherit the Wind.

To stage such a fragmented work, Mixed Blood broke apart the act of spectatorship. After viewing an introductory episode by Hatcher on stage, the audience split into eight smaller sections. Each group was led by a "tour guide" to additional scenes scattered throughout Mixed Blood's converted 19th-century firehouse, before convening again in the auditorium for a finale by Hatcher. Crowds shuttled among the theatre's most confined and uncomfortable spaces: a dressing room, a narrow hallway, a lighting closet, and even out in the parking lot (with blankets provided to stave off the Minnesota winter chill). Neon lights and blaring music punctuated the two-minute intervals allotted for audience travel. Beyond the content of Bill of (W)rights, the mechanics of Mixed Blood's staging carried the more urgent statement for contemporary America: Confronting erosion of our freedoms is taxing work that demands active communal engagement, not passive or relaxed observance.

Though politically resonant both in content and form, Bill of (W)rights demonstrates the collaborative model's artistic pitfalls. Playwright Chay Yew (a participant in several recent cooperative writing projects) fears that "ultimately, the multiplicity of voices can be a trap. Does it lead to a bigger picture, with a true sense of cohesion? The individual plays may be gems by themselves, but when strung together, do they make a gorgeous necklace?" Yew's sparkling metaphor gets right to the heart of the genre's adolescent growing pains—the difficulty with composing a satisfying theatrical whole while maintaining conspicuous diversity among all parts. Ma-Yi Theater Company's recent pastiche-play Savage Acts is a case in point. As part of an October 2004 conference "Performing Ethnicity" (marking the centennial of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair), Ma-Yi's artistic director Ralph Peña charged a diverse group of dramatists—Kia Corthron, Jorge Cortiñas, Han Ong and Sung Rno—to reflect on a landmark event in America's history of imperialism. "We looked at the 1904 World's Fair, how it compartmentalized the exhibition of race and otherness for the American public," says Peña. "Asians, Eskimos and other indigenous groups each had their own pavilion where native peoples and their culture were put on display. I wanted to contemporize that experience. That suggested multiple viewpoints." The four plays comprising Savage Acts are gems indeed—each a passionate engagement with concerns of ethnic minorities in contemporary America.

But to what do they add up when strung together? Corthron's P.O.W.W. imagines a present-day fair pavilion housing a wrongly imprisoned Arab on loan from Guantanamo Bay, to criticize our nation's treatment of Middle Eastern "detainees." Ong's Peripherama examines an Asian-American actor's frustration with marginalization by mass culture. Rno's Behind the Masq sends up inter-ethnic fetishism through its portrait of a hip-hop group "Bun Roc Q" (sounds like bunraku) fronted by a suburban-bred MIT-educated Korean/Filipino angry rapper "DMZ" and a white male obsessed with ancient Japanese puppetry. Cortiñas's Look, a Latino! is a melodramatic portrait of a discontented Hispanic boy's relationship with his beleaguered mother. To connect the works in performance, Peña wrote speeches for a carnival barker and worked with designers to create within New York City's Ohio Theater a turn-of-the-century fairground atmosphere. Organ music, passersby in period costumes and sensational signage suggested a thematic tie-in with the World's Fair centennial. But the suggestions made by these interludes never emerge consistently in the plays themselves. Only Behind the Masq articulates both sides of the 1904 World's Fair legacy—not only American prejudiced attitudes, but also the cross-cultural curiosity that a public preoccupation with difference can breed. Corthron's play is one-sidedly didactic; Ong's perspective is more personal; Cortiñas's drama becomes largely private and sentimental. Peña appreciates how "each writer came in with a distinctive take. It was pleasantly surprising how each playwright stuck to his or her strength, and found a unique way of commenting on race and racism." While the four dramas can stand confidently on their own for that reason, the production's transitional scenes work more as a papering-over of broad associations of "race" and "ethnicity," rather than as expressions of true ideological kinship among them or with a chosen moment in history.

The Antigone Project was another instance of noble aspirations meeting with uneven results. Miyagawa conceived the work with choreographer-director Sabrina Peck (and later developed it with Women's Project producing artistic director Loretta Greco) in response to the present national climate. Its five episodes share one common attribute: a character named Antigone confronting some form of political hostility. But does The Antigone Project serve Miyagawa's aims more effectively than if she had written her own full-length treatment of Sophocles—as Brecht, Anouilh and many others have done? Does the multimedia-enhanced abstraction of Svich's Antigone Arke engage in meaningful dialogue with (or simply stand alongside) Barfield's Medallion, a pathos-filled World War II setting of the Antigone/Creon confrontation, or Hartman's Hang Ten, which places Antigone and Ismene on beach chairs as disaffected 21st-century surfer girls? The heroine of Nottage's Stone's Throw is more an African Juliet than an Antigone as she pursues forbidden love in defiance of violent tribal hatreds. Does this play even belong with the others?

Valid questions can also be posed from the opposite perspective. Why shouldn't these artists follow any impulse inspired by Sophocles, no matter how divergent from those of their partners? Does it violate the democratic spirit of collaborative drama to demand a cohesive necklace, rather than a richly contrasting pile of gems? According to Miyagawa, she and her collaborators see their creation "not as a collection of five plays, but as one play in five parts." Even so, when produced by Women's Project on a bare stage with blackouts dividing its sections, The Antigone Project worked more as a celebration of its own aesthetic diversity (and, one might say, the idea of aesthetic diversity) than as an integrated reworking of Sophocles.

Some have sought an elusive balance between cohesion and variation through a process commonly called "La Ronde playwriting." In this chain-play model, which is reminiscent of "The Exquisite Corpse," a scenario passes from one playwright to the next for development, often with guidelines for maintaining some degree of continuity. Playwright Robert O'Hara tackled the form recently by taking his racy 10-minute play Drinks and Desire and circulating it among some willing friends. Keith Josef Atkins, Kia Corthron, Edwin Sanchez, Tracey Scott Wilson and Chay Yew took turns expanding upon O'Hara's original invention under these parameters:

"Those rules were somewhat arbitrary," explains O'Hara. "This was never designed as a well-made play, but I wanted to keep the exercise practical, so that each writer would work with what he or she was given." After receiving all contributions, O'Hara wrote a loose-end-tying final scene, and called the work Play. Through its travels, Play evolved into a drama whose continuity is strained (though never broken completely) by radical shifts in language, tone and social perspective. For instance, Yew followed O'Hara's terse and tense two-character negotiation with a fluid, meditative interior monologue. He also defined one of O'Hara's previously unspecified characters as an Asian-American. "In this format," Yew feels, "you have to bring in your own style, baggage and beliefs and set them right on the table. You have no choice but to make the landscape yours." Yew's partners were equally bold with their own landscaping work.

After arranging a reading at New York City's Public Theater, O'Hara shared Play with Chad Beckim and Molly Pearson, co-directors of Partial Comfort Productions (which produced Drinks and Desire during a February 2003 evening of O'Hara's shorter works). "What attracted us to Play was its variety," says Pearson. "Rather than something that can be pigeonholed as a 'gay play,' an 'Asian play,' a 'black play' or a 'woman's play,' we were looking at something not so easy to label. Imagine how long the phrase would have to be to describe this work." Partial Comfort produced Play in June 2004, and found among spectators and critics some resistance to its multiple dramatic personalities. "Some people loved it, and some hated it. Most reviewers criticized us for working in a form that demanded so much work from the audience. That seemed insulting," Pearson recalls with a smirk. "Why wouldn't audiences want to work?" Beckim, also an actor in the production, remembers: "One night, a jazz musician in the audience commented that it reminded him of a quartet, with players answering one another in different registers, improvising off what had come before."

Yew's experience with La Ronde writing leaves him less enthusiastic about the viability of the form. "It was a fun exercise, to see my play as a domino knocked over by someone else's domino. But I'm not sure it made sense as a whole." He might not attach the same ambivalence to Face Value, the La Ronde project devised and coordinated by Polly Carl as part of the Playwrights Center's 2004 PlayLabs Festival. Its five participating writers—Janet Allard, Jordan Harrison, Naomi Iizuka, Kira Obolensky and John Walch—use their rotation to play a deft game of one-upmanship with plot complications. Face Value is an intricate thriller in which instances of facial transplant surgery (that is, one character's physiognomy medically implanted on another's body) repeatedly wrap the drama back on itself and bind its characters' fates (and faces) more and more tightly. Propelled by the pressure of its plot, the script's aesthetic variations are not nearly so striking. "It's actually quite tidy," Carl says about the finished product. "We didn't know that would happen so neatly." The question in this case is whether Face Value might be too neat and tidy. What, beyond its social opportunities, distinguishes a collaborative drama when it might be mistaken for the work of one author?

A more complicated balancing act between continuity and multiplicity is the 2004 Humana Festival's Fast and Loose: a quartet of playwrights collaborating on four independent but criss-crossing domino chains. Billed as "an ethical collaboration," the play confronts four thorny moral quandaries: Should one share a secret if disclosure hurts others? Should decisions be based on principles alone, or on foreseeable consequences? Do standards of right and wrong transcend cultural context? Is altruism possible, or is selfless action simply disguised self-interest? Playwrights José Cruz González, Kirsten Greenidge, Julie Marie Myatt and John Walch each penned an opening scene related to one of these questions, and took turns developing the other three scenarios. The final text of Fast and Loose intersperses scenes from all tracks in a rotating sequence so that no situation, set of characters or single writer's voice occupies the stage for long.

Dramaturg Steve Moulds found that the simultaneous collaborations instilled within its writers "both a freeing effect and a sense of group responsibility. Each playwright started a scenario with a bold, open-ended gesture, as a way of inviting collaborators to follow suit and raise the stakes." The dynamic of escalation is most visible in Wake God's Man, the section exploring disclosure of painful secrets. González initiates the track with an image of "a human body…suspended horizontally above the stage…wrapped in shards of white cloth like a mummy." For the second scene, Walch took this picture and cut it open, literally: "Something begins spilling from the mummified form—pecans. The pecans hit the stage deck and scatter." Greenidge next infused life into the picture: "Above the stage, the body seems to inhale, then exhale.… The body begins to tremble, and continues throughout." Myatt responds with an opposite, totalizing gesture of erasure: "The body bag is empty, and the body is gone from above the stage." Director Wendy McClellan found it "amazing to watch the writers pick up on each other's images and transform them so boldly." As with Play, the La Ronde model unleashed within the same drama repeated jolts of new energy that redirected, but never shattered, continuity within each track.

McClellan grounded each strain of the drama in its own specific location on the stage. "I wanted to reinforce visually, at all times, that multiple stories were evolving." She and her design team created an asymmetrical landscape of green hills strewn with large props and set pieces. The objects served as important points of focus for one storyline, and visible placeholders jutting out from the ground when the drama switched its bearings. With continuity and fragmentation bumping against each other so prominently, did Fast and Loose make for a desirable theatrical necklace? The answer may just depend on one's particular taste in jewelry. "Some audience members had fun with the style of the play," says McClellan. "Others were frustrated, because they craved either more cohesion or less cohesion in the piece as a whole. I can understand all of those reactions."

If the collaborative-play genre is to progress, McClellan feels that theatres must rethink how they fund and support collaborative undertakings. "From what I have observed, these projects are treated as groups of mini-commissions. They're ambitious in scope, but do not get the time or the funding they need to evolve into balanced works. A single playwright will get a year or more to develop a new play, but many collaborative dramas are given just a few months." Advocates such as Polly Carl are optimistic that the collaborative form can create its own momentum for future growth. "It can be hard to move the theatre out of its comfort zone," Carl says. "But my hope is that these projects stretch our thinking about the field, and can expand our notion of how theatre gets made. You never know how that might inspire someone."

Jonathan Shandell is a 2003–04 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.