Plays Well With Others
by Morwyn Brebner

Theatre Alberta and Alberta Playwrights’ Network were honoured to host Morwyn Brebner as the keynote speaker at PlayWorks Ink 2007. The following is Morwyn’s full keynote address, delivered at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, on November 3, 2007.

Listen to Morwyn's Keynote >  [28 MB / 40 min.]

I grew up in Ottawa—the most passive-aggressive place in the universe. I’m afraid of argument. I am pathologically averse to confrontation. I would rather throw myself under a train like Anna Karenina than have words even with someone with whom I vehemently disagree. A friend of mine once said, “The thing about you is that you like everyone.” No, but I hide my hostility, I’m eager to please, and the thing I fear most is not being liked. In that way, I think I’m a lot like the Canadian theatre. Or rather, I am in apt position to speak about the current state of playwriting, the only art I know how to practise, an art with so much promise and potential to speak to the world it is not even funny.

I will say up front that I believe in playwriting. I believe in its future. And I believe in Canadian theatre. I would like to argue with it, though, as I imagine people from healthy families argue: furiously, knowing that underneath there is love. And the argument I would like to make is that we all need to argue more.

Actually, let me clarify what I mean by argument, so you don’t think I mean the kind of sniping people actually do with their families. “Why did you crush my dreams?” or “Why did you give me the Merck Manual for Christmas when you know I’m a hypochondriac?” Not that kind of argument. The Oxford English Dictionary defines argument as “a heated exchange of conflicting views” or “a set of reasons given in support of something.” A heated exchange of conflicting views. A set of reasons given in support of something. Both of these might as well be definitions of a play. Let’s just assume for now that by argument I mean a conflict that is deeply felt, but not personal in the pejorative sense of that word. I’m not talking about being petty.

Let me clarify that I don’t think theatre is “in trouble.” People say that. “Theatre is in trouble.” The fortunes of various art forms expand and contract like asphalt through the seasons. There are people who feel that all culture is “in trouble.” Well the world is in trouble. And it’s up to all art forms, including theatre, to confront that trouble or die.

I’d like to talk about argument in three contexts. 1) Argument with the world: a play should be a set of reasons given in support of something that pertains to the state of the world, AND a heated exchange with the status quo and with the audience. 2) Argument between ourselves: as playwrights we don’t have to agree with each other; in fact, we shouldn’t. 3) Argument in our process: the way we workshop and rehearse plays should be a dialectic, not a consensus.

These points may not appear in that particular order.

Number one: ARGUMENT WITH THE WORLD.

In preparation for this speech, I felt I should read some books about the theatre—about thinking about the theatre, if that makes sense. So I read The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a title you would not want to pronounce with a lisp. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t read it before—it was on my list of books I pretended I’d read, along with The Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick, which I did start. The Quintessence of Ibsenism is a book that the playwright George Bernard Shaw published in 1891. It’s a short book but it was massively influential. In it, Shaw describes the plays of Ibsen, their reception by the critics, and what they really mean. (I read recently a quote, I can’t remember by whom, that Shaw was so well-read that he actually did know what everyone meant, and that this made him seem insincere.)

Anyhow, Ibsen, “the father of modern drama” (a genre that is apparently motherless, but that’s another speech) was incredibly controversial, in Victorian days, because his plays argued that the individual’s moral responsibility is to his or her own will, not to institutions such as the church or marriage. That these institutions in fact harmed people because they promoted abstract values over true human freedom and happiness. So in The Doll’s House (The Dollhouse—the title has many translations), Nora’s only solution, if she wishes to be what we would now call self-actualized, is to leave the marriage that is suffocating her, although it will render her a pariah. Conversely, in Ghosts, Mrs. Alving sticks by her cheating husband, doing what is technically “right”, and consequently her son ends up with syphilis.

Ibsen’s argument, that doing what’s “wrong” is right and what’s “right” is wrong, did not go over with the critics. The critics hated these plays. I’m used to the Toronto critics and even by those standards, Ibsen was received harshly. Ghosts was called “an open sore”, “repulsive”, “degrading”, “unwholesome” and “disgusting.” They compared Ibsen essentially to a pimp, pimping his antisocial, filthy views. These same plays, of course, inspired Shaw. The Quintessesnce of Ibsenism is Shaw’s argument that “Ibsenism”—or the idea that you should do what you want, rather than rationalizing that you want to do what you think you should do—is the way forward for society and therefore for theatre. The Q of I as I’ll call it, is a polemical work of moral philosophy. And it is more about Shaw than it is about Ibsen.

The Q of I was based on a lecture that Shaw gave the year before the book was written, which I like to imagine as a kind of Fidel Castro-esque harangue, Shaw being really the Castro of theatre. For me, there were two immediately interesting things about The Q of I. The edition I have is the third edition, which was published in 1922. It begins with a preface—for those of you who aren’t familiar with Shaw, he is fond of the preface. All his plays have lengthy prefaces instructing you on what the play is about. But the preface to the 1922 edition of The Q of I is short. In it Shaw explains that the context of the book, written 30 years earlier, has changed because of the First World War. He hasn’t rewritten his book, but feels a need to call attention to the fact that the war, which was such a brutal catastrophe, has changed the context within which everyone is writing. He acknowledges that if the book were a post-war book it would be a different book.

He writes: “But I cannot spend the rest of my life drawing the moral of the war. It must suffice to say here that as war throws back civilization inevitably, leaving everything worse than it was... old books on morals become new and topical again; and old prophets are read with a new sense of the importance of their message. That is perhaps why a new edition of this book is demanded.”

But then on the next page, there is a preface to the 1913 edition of the book, where Shaw ten years earlier contextualizes his book for that time: Ibsen has been accepted into the pantheon, Shaw is older, blah blah blah... Shaw’s still not going to rewrite his book, but he feels the need to point out the new context.

Then there’s the first preface, which I won’t go into.

What’s interesting about this, aside from Shaw’s general egomania in believing that the world was demanding his slim, esoteric volume, is that it shows that Shaw was in constant conversation with himself and with the political and social world he lived in. He was acutely aware of his time and the place of his art within it. In his book he said he was trying to “distill the quintessence of Ibsen’s message to his age.” In doing so, he was really distilling his own message to his age. And that idea—that your play is your message to your age—is crucial. That’s what writing a play is. It’s your message to your age. It presumes that you are embedded in your time, engaged in its struggles and that you have things to say, vital things, in your play that are more than just about you and your feelings.

I would like to digress for a second and talk about the subconscious. Despite what I’m going to say in a few moments, I actually believe we undervalue the place of the subconscious in writing plays. You cannot consciously “think” of every element of a play. Writers are not usually intellectuals and a play is not a treatise or an essay. I had a teacher in theatre school who insisted that you should be able to write a log line for your play. A log line is a screenwriting term for a sentence that summarizes your project. It works for simple ideas: “Two sexy renegade cops solve crimes in Miami.” “Three sexy friends have sex in New York.” “Three Playmates have sex with Hugh Hefner and live in his house.” The idea that you can do this for a complex work of art is ludicrous.

In The Q of I Shaw puts it well when he says that “the evidence of a discernible and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it.” In other, smaller words: a writer can have a message and a strong point of view without being able to define it. Harold Pinter, for instance, claims that he writes largely subconsciously. The subconscious is a great distiller of meaning. So much of writing takes place in the weirder nether-realms of the mind. I’m always amazed when people read Shakespeare and try to parse every word—I can’t believe, genius though he was, that even Shakespeare was fully conscious as he was writing. It would be like a tennis player trying to serve while noticing all the mechanics of her wrist and elbow and shoulder and ankles. You would cramp up and fall over.

As a playwright the point is to acquire enough craft that you can channel all the detritus you’re constantly skimming off the surface of life and mix it with memory and experience and whatever ideas you’re having and come up with something surprising and new. A lot of this essentially alchemical work needs to be subconscious. I once wrote a short story in high school; the assignment was to include a central metaphor. My metaphor was a knife, which represented the terrible divisions in the household. The story was called “The Knife.” It ended with the main character stabbed in the gut, rolling around on the lawn saying “The knife! The knife!” The subconscious makes more interesting connections than that.

At its best, the act of writing has an organic flow that feels, if not effortless, overwhelming. You do hear the stereotypical voices speaking as if there were other people crammed inside your head. You feel overtaken by a kind of velocity; you feel like an instrument of what is being written. This act of imagining, in which you feel the most yourself and yet greater than yourself, is not something anybody can produce merely by a conscious act of will. You remember your childhood, think of whatever events most affect you, remember the way furniture was arranged in the shabby house where you grew up. This alchemizes. If you’re Arthur Miller, you get Death of a Salesman. If you’re Tennessee Williams, you get The Glass Menagerie. If you’re me, you get a first play that your mother refuses to come and see and that is never produced again.

We have become scientific with our dramaturgy and with this comes the presumption that all plays have problems that can be solved by rational means. I don’t think this is true. An idea bound by the subconscious has a very tight warp and weft. It’s a piece of silk, not a pot holder you wove at camp. It must be unpicked carefully, if at all. Sometimes a play’s strengths are a function of its weaknesses. And sometimes its weaknesses are a function of its weaknesses. How do you know what is which is which? What is a technical problem: a scene ends twice and is too long? Or what is simply something that was dictated subconsciously and has yet to be figured out: the scene is too long, but if we could think about it in a new way, we would realize that the “second ending” is actually a vital escalation of the action? The scene then is not too long. But how do you know which point of view is right?

If we accept that a play is not, in fact, rationally constructed, then we can’t rationally deconstruct it in hopes of “fixing” it. We have to accept that, given a certain level of artistry, it is what it is and has to be taken as such. So instead of saying “This doesn’t work,” when a play fails to conform to our expectations, maybe instead we should say “How does this work?”

For instance, I wrote a play called The Optimists, which looks pretty much like a realistic comedy. I don’t think of it like that: I’m interested in the way time works on stage and I was trying to compress the action of that play without it showing. This is not an idea covered in traditional dramaturgical discussions and I am not especially articulate in describing my own work. But this did become part of the discussion when the play was first produced because the director was committed to investigating how the play worked. We argued all the time: it was horrible and nerve-wracking—I lost weight and the skin on my face cracked with stress and exposure to the fiendishly dry Calgary air as I walked from mall to mall after being kicked out of rehearsal—but it was a successful process.

So I believe: WE MUST ARGUE MORE IN REHEARSAL.

Dramaturgy is not the problem. Complaining about dramaturgy is like saying you got a bad nose job—there’s culpability on both sides. Theatre is a collaborative medium. Collaboration understood not in the Vichy government sense, as a series of constant and compromising capitulations, but as a dialectical process where, by advocating strongly for your own position, you add to the tensile strength of the entire endeavor. As a playwright it is perfectly reasonable to assume that you know more about your play than anyone else does. And your place in rehearsal is to defend the thing you birthed as fiercely as you possibly can, without undermining and destroying the rehearsal process that is there to bring it fully to life. If you’re lucky, your director and actors will do the same and the end product will benefit from the rigours of being forged in this crucible.

A strong belief in one’s own idiosyncratic version of the world is something playwrights should cultivate from the beginning. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first play. When I started writing, I benefited immensely from being crazy. I don’t mean that as a joke. I was like a poorly socialized hyena, with no interpersonal skills; I was constantly combative and angry, especially with people who were helping me. I believed, probably wrongly, that what I was writing was new. And although I often felt beleaguered and indeed heartbroken when people didn’t understand what I was trying to say, I was crazy enough to believe it was important.

Now some of what I argued for seems silly: the maddening overpunctuation I fought to retain when my first play was published, or the time I lay on the floor in the fetal position in the theatre, moaning, with my sweater over my head, during a preview of another play. These weren’t necessarily good choices, and they required a kind of manic intensity I’m not sure I could recreate, but they were part of my argument at the time. Other people argued back and I learned.

The unspoken truth is that being good doesn’t help you as an artist. Being intransigent or defensive doesn’t either, and there’s probably some optimal happy medium between openness and protectiveness wherein you can both safeguard your vision and advance your craft. But in the end, as the writer you’re responsible for what you write. Your play is your argument with the world, and you have to stand by it. You have to stick up for it like it’s the odd kid on the bus who has to wear a hockey helmet everywhere. You must be your play’s protector.

So to reiterate: the subconscious is good. It’s necessary. But it’s not enough. As playwrights, we can’t be dreaming, even lucid dreaming: we have to be awake. We have to be conscious.

In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw contends that Ibsen only became a great playwright after he became intellectually conscious of what he was trying to achieve. Ibsen’s early poetical dramas like Peer Gynt and Brand are sprawling, picaresque fantasias. They’re trying to articulate some things about the individual’s relationship to society, and if you can figure out what’s going on amidst the orgies and glaciers and mountain panoramas and trolls and metaphorical onions, you can glean some things. But Shaw rightly points out that after Ibsen becomes conscious of what he is doing, his work improves. Like Robert Johnson, he comes back from the crossroads with scary new powers. Knowing that he wants to directly engage the world and its problems, Ibsen writes Ghosts, The Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler. He would not have had the same impact on the world if he had kept unspooling his wacky Nordic adventure stories. Looking inward to his imagination was not enough to make Ibsen a great playwright. He had to look outward, to the world.

This is true of all great playwrights. It’s true of Chekhov, who channelled the minutia and greater currents of a world too insular to know it was becoming irrelevant. It’s true of Beckett, a miracle worker who could look out by looking in, and who invented a form commensurate with a newly fragmented post-war world held hostage by nuclear bombs. It’s true of Caryl Churchill, whose great subject is politics and whose entire oeuvre is a rebuke to Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that “society does not exist.” But it’s dicey to leave important work to geniuses—and I think that now, especially, it is incumbent upon all of us to look outward.

I feel that I am at a crossroads in my own work. I often wish the devil would show up and help me out. But I don’t believe in him and he’s not going to, so I am doing my damndest to become intellectually conscious and outward-looking and I’ll tell you, it’s a hell of a struggle. I have, in my short career, voraciously strip-mined my own internal preoccupations. Some of these I used to feel were inherently political—growing up poor in a country that doesn’t acknowledge poor people, except in kitschy ways. I felt this gave me a different perspective in a largely middle-class art form. Being a feminist. But I think I have generally relied too heavily on my subconscious and it’s no longer enough. My argument with the world has been largely an argument with myself, or facets of myself.

That’s true of a lot of plays qua plays. This is a generalization, so don’t take offence if you’re the exception, but playwrights in this country are still pretty heavily chained to the kitchen sink. We’re like the domesticated zombie in Shaun of the Dead: capable of damage but subdued by the cozy lure of domesticity.

This is where I ARGUE WITH OTHER PLAYWRIGHTS.

I have stopped knowing what structure is. I am beginning to believe that talking about structure is beside the point. Structure is actually a subset of form, which is linked to content. Three acts is a structure; the three act play is a form. It follows that the hand is a form, the fingers are the structure, and the purpose is to be able to open doors and crack lobsters. New purposes demand new forms.

The realistic play, with scenes separated using transitions, is the dominant form in this country. English Canada, I mean. This is not true in other countries, and I wonder why it is here. I like that form, but it can only say certain things, and I believe part of becoming conscious of what you’re trying to achieve as a playwright includes exploring your formal options. I can’t think of a single Canadian playwright I know, and I include myself, who is a real formalist.

I mean hard-core formalist, Caryl Churchill, or the Belgian playwright I met who wrote a play, a comedy, about a man considering killing his mother. The first part of the play was a long internal monologue meant to be performed by an indeterminate number of actors; the second was a dialogue between the man and his family; the third, which represented the actual killing, was written completely in onomatopoeia; the end was a series of four short poems with words missing. She invented this form to suit her subject and form, in fact, is her major concern as a playwright. This doesn’t have to be true of every writer, but it’s a strand of theatre’s argument with itself that is kind of missing here.

I’m talking about old school plays here—the kind you write in a room by yourself. Maybe you talk to some people, or do some research, but at some point you write it all down by yourself in a little room. This is absolutely not the only way to write a play: at the last Dora Awards in the Independent Division, four out of five nominees for Best New Play were not traditional plays, but devised works created by a collective. I’m cool with that. (I know it sounds like I’m protesting too much “Yeah, I’m cool with that. Date whoever you like.”) You don’t have to inhibit one art form to promote another. But I do think that the traditionally written play is like a squirrel that has tunnelled into the walls and is in danger of suffocating in the insulation.

In a world where our very physical existence is imperilled by global warming; where we know this but do nothing substantial to stop it; where competition for resources and space is driving elephants crazy to the point where they’re raping rhinoceroses; where people are being killed in genocides and ill-considered wars; where the arctic is melting and The Globe and Mail is excited about new shipping routes; where political discourse is increasingly brainless; where post-feminism is re-rendering women into blow-up dolls; where photographers are more interested in Britney Spears than in a devastating fire; where class and income divisions are increasing and even middle-class people dwell like polar bears on unstable ice flows, thinking rich while being one sunshiny day away from drowning in debt; in a world where if you do yoga you’re an altruist; in a world where you have to take your shoes off to fly on a plane; in a world where we are so overstimulated by fear and worry that it seems almost more sensible to look inward than to risk being blinded by the shrapnel flying everywhere—I am sorry, but in that world I’m not sure that a play about anyone’s mean family or their quirky sexual awakening really cuts it any more. We have simply got to be more conscious, more aware, more concerned, and more serious, or we will become irrelevant.

That said, a world comprised of only agit-prop would be hell. Like Soviet Communism it would be fun for a week and then it would pale. There are many ways to engage the world. Collective creations and verbatim theatre are good at putting a kaleidoscope of experience on stage. A play is good at distilling the world into a diamond, where the facets are smaller but gleam more brightly.

I’m working on a comedy right now. It’s not directly about global warming or set in Iraq or about a family losing its house in the mortgage crisis, but I hope that it will feel like a play that could only be written in a time when these things are true. And I hope it will speak to this time in a way that says more than just “I’m lost, help me.” I hope it will be an argument for something, not just against something, which has been my habit.

Audiences are hungry to be confronted with truth about the world. It’s true. Playwrights are crazy not to want some of that action. Documentaries are in on that action. Music, novels, even TV. I truly believe that most writers write because they don’t see themselves represented in the world. We write to remake the world in our image. But in order for playwriting to really be part of the cultural conversation in this country, we have to engage with more than just our own fixations.

I was on a panel recently and a writer from France said that the theatre is like a courtroom—the audience is there and you have to make your case. It’s classic to say that the theatre is a sacred space, like a church. Either way, it’s a receptive space that is inherently set up for dialogue, for argument. A novelist has many readers in separate rooms; a playwright engages the collective. Our engagement with this collective audience can be incredibly deep. We don’t just have to offer pleasure in return for applause.

So let’s fight with the audience more. Why not? It’ll be fun. Let’s argue with other playwrights too. Let’s have crazy rivalries. Let’s encourage artistic directors to program plays that make them nervous. But most of all, let’s write plays that make us nervous ourselves. To quote Shaw quoting Ibsen, we must question “the old beauty that is no longer beautiful and the new beauty that is no longer true.” We must find new, unbeautiful truths. And even if everyone disagrees with us, we must put them on stage.

Morwyn Brebner’s plays include Music for Contortionist, award-winning musical Little Mercy’s First Murder, The Optimists (nominated for the 2006 Governor General’s Award for Drama) and The Pessimist. Her translations include Strawberries in January and Mathilde; her adaptations include Love Among the Russians for the Shaw Festival; her writing for television includes The Eleventh Hour and At the Hotel. She is a Playwright in Residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s playwriting program.