IT is just seven weeks now until my play Eden opens at Brunker Community Theatre on June 24, before moving onto Newcastle Theatre Company for a two-week run (July 6 to 16).
As with most shows, the production process begins with a readthrough of the script, attended by all the cast and support crew, including the designer, production manager and stage management team. It's a first opportunity for many to hear the play out loud and, for the writer, to see how their words rise from the page.
While I am an experienced playwright, with numerous professional productions of my work under my belt, it's always both scary and exciting. Will the dialogue that sounded good in my head come out right in the actors' mouths? Will the characters shape up? Will the complexity and nuances of the play's theme - a woman dealing with repressed memories of childhood trauma - emerge or will my work be judged as superficial or even misguided?
As a playwright, possibly more than in any other form of scribbling, one puts one's work into the public domain while ultimately being reliant on a director, actors and a whole creative team for realising one's vision.
As any creative person knows, it can be challenging letting your work go, but one has to learn to trust in the process and the people involved in it. Fortunately, I can have complete faith in Janet Nelson, a vastly experienced professional theatre director, to whom I have entrusted Eden. From our first discussions of the play, she has been meticulous, supportive and dedicated to delivering the best version of the work possible.
Janet has assembled a talented cast of four, including two actors from her excellent 2021 production of The House of Bernarda Alba - Denni Manille, playing central character, Carla, and Sandy Aldred, in the role of her best friend Ginnie.
The readthrough goes well, and after the first few pages I start breathing again! We are underway.
A week later and Janet is putting the actors, in character, in "the hot seat", having previously asked them to develop their life stories, about which they will now be questioned. It's an intriguing process and one that helps the actors begin to own their characters. For me, it's fascinating to watch my characters take on a life of their own and I discover depths and details about them I didn't know existed.
One question, about forgiveness, from a trauma expert advising the production, reveals a whole backstory to one character that I'd never considered.
It feels like a kind of beautiful torture sharing one's artistic vision with other creative people, relying on them to understand your intent and trying to be sufficiently robust to stand aside as they shape my work into a piece of live theatre.
For a playwright to be able to attend all rehearsals and to watch the process of building toward live performance is the learning opportunity of a lifetime. By week three, the umbilical cord that links me to my play begins to loosen.
It may take a few more weeks before the cord is cut, and before the baby is ready to be presented to the world, but the birth now feels both inevitable and ultimately out of my hands. I recognise this when, one dark April night, Janet has each actor attribute the physical characteristics of various animals to their roles and interact with each other.
As they circle the rehearsal room, one roaring like a lion, one prancing skittishly like a horse and another prowling like a panther, Janet guides them to inhabit and physicalise their characters in a way that takes them way beyond the written page.
There is method in the seeming madness. For me, this process is a distillation of why writing for theatre is so exhilarating. When we sit down as an audience we are interacting with real human beings who are revealing parts of themselves, ourselves, or others that we know, in a live experience. Anything can happen and frequently does.
I have never seen two identical performances of any play I've seen more than once. The audience makes all the difference. As Shakespeare wrote, and actors playing Hamlet have repeated countless times in productions across the globe, over centuries, "the play's the thing".
