HOW READING PLAYS MADE ME A PLAYWRIGHT: The Tale a Theater Kid, A Local Library, and a Ten Cent Book Sale

 

Me, With Two of My Childhood Teachers

For better or worse (I like to think better, except when I'm short on cash and in need of a bigger royalty check), I grew up in a theatrical household. I don't just mean because of the drama, though we certainly had our fair share. No, I mean that my parents were both involved in theater from the time I was a very young age. I remember tagging along with my older sisters to my parents' rehearsals for Blithe Spirit as part of a theater group they were trying to start in our home town, and then, later on, driving an hour to and from Lakewood Theater every summer. Certainly it was this life of witnessing rehearsals, hearing them run lines (and memorizing them before they did) and experiencing their love for it that made me want to be involved in theater myself. And indeed, I got my chance when I was cast as Winthrop in The Music Man at the age of ten. Throughout the next years, I was not just tagging along with my parents to Lakewood, but rehearsing for plays myself. 

Along with my own burgeoning love of performing, I was simply fascinated and terribly curious about how plays were made. From the time I was twelve or thirteen, I began to simply love the act of reading scripts, seeing how they worked. I suppose in my mind, I wanted to learn how to write plays for me to star in. I was barely a teenager, so I can be forgiven such a self-serving ambition, right?

My hometown library is called the Thompson Free Library, and while it didn't necessarily have the largest collection of plays you could ever hope to ask for, it had more than one might think for such a small town. In the picture above, you can see there volumes of "The Best American Plays" which spanned from the 1950s to the early 1980s. I started taking those books out and devouring as many plays as I could. I distinctly remember reading Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, while not completely understanding what was going on, I was excited by the electricity of the dialogue and the characters, the way they talked to each other, using their words as weapons. I remember reading Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad and again being thrilled by this energy, this complete sense of possibility. Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky spoke to me in a way I couldn't fully describe. I checked out each volume of this Best American Play series more than once ( as well as collections they had of Neil Simon, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder). I began to learn the work of some of the masters, and witnessed how theater evolved from decade to decade. 

Though I didn't know it at the time, reading and re-reading these volumes were just as much a part of my theater and playwriting education as all of my work in college. My playwriting professor at Bennington, Gladden Schrock, had indeed made the point that a great way to learn how to write plays was to read plays (and see them, too, of course). These plays made me want to be part of their world.

As I got older, and found more extensive libraries at college, I was able to branch out from simply the best AMERICAN plays, and learn where favorites like Albee, Kopit, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Durang, and David Mamet picked up their bag of tricks from (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, etc.). But these volumes gave me an incredible base of knowledge, but, perhaps even more importantly, it kept me wanting to know more, to read more, to act more, to write more. Would I have ever wanted to direct a play if I hadn't directed the plays in these volumes in my mind dozens of different ways? Would I have ever taken joy in creating dialogue if I hadn't learned from the masters on these pages? 

I tell you this, and I believe it wholeheartedly:  one way to really keep our American Theater vital and vibrant, is to normalize the reading of plays the same way we do novels, from a very young age. I know some schools in fact do this, but it should be a given in every district all around the country in my opinion. Reading out loud helps students connect to the characters and the story, it teaches empathy, teaches us how to relate. It inspires us to set the stage in our own minds. If we started with plays early on, Shakespeare would not be such a challenge when we get to high school.

But I digress:

The Thompson Free Library had its first ten cent book sale since Covid-19 a few months ago. I love the ten cent book sale, and always am proud of certain finds. But this year, when I went in with my Mother, as they were only allowing a few people at a time, the woman who runs the sale said, "We have some books set aside that we thought you might be interested in."  She went off into a side room, and came out with four volumes of these Best American Plays, the very same books I had taken out so often, more years ago than seem possible. It brought up a great deal of emotion in an interesting way. To buy these books that have meant so much to me, that have been a part of me even more than I realized. These four volumes truly were some of my earliest theater teachers. 

A great education, now purchased for only forty cents. 

Cracking the covers and looking over old favorites is already actively filling up the creative well. 

If you love theater, read plays. Lots and lots of them. You'll be glad you did.