The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis was staging Matthew Lopez’s “The Legend of Georgia McBride” this summer when a national brouhaha erupted that could have affected the production.
The chairman of Papa John’s Pizza was forced to resign after using a racial slur. Yet the hero of the 2015 play, a lighthearted comedy, is a broke Elvis impersonator who turns to drag to support his family when a splurge order of Papa John’s leads to the rent check bouncing.
The theater went to Mr. Lopez with a request: Would he agree to substitute another corporate pizza chain so as not to be distracting? Mr. Lopez readily agreed. Problem solved. (He declined to discuss the decision.)
But for many playwrights, the productions that follow a play’s premiere — when it is handed over to theaters around the country and the world — can be fraught. And more than the purveyor of pepperoni is at stake.
First and foremost, casting can become an issue, especially when characters are written to be played by specific genders or ethnic groups. But for living playwrights, other ways directors and actors interpret (or tamper with?) their writing can be nerve-racking, too.
Rajiv Joseph recalls the advice delivered in a class taught by none other than Edward Albee: “Be as explicit with instructions for delivering lines as possible.”
But at that point in his career, Mr. Joseph didn’t completely buy in to the opinion of a playwright known for exerting extreme authorial control. “I felt actors’ artistic choices were helping my writing so I didn’t want to be too prescriptive,” he said.
His experience with “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” led him to think twice about Albee’s warning. Mr. Joseph had worked closely with the director Moisés Kaufman and several actors through the play’s first three productions, including its 2011 Broadway run.
The character of Kev, whom Mr. Joseph called an “extremely immature and not very bright soldier” who later becomes “introspective and intelligent as a ghost,” was developed with the actor Brad Fleischer. Mr. Joseph left him room to interpret the writing.
But later productions revealed that other actors could not provide the same nuance and texture “so the character comes across underwritten and as a stereotype that might be offensive to soldiers,” Mr. Joseph said.
“That started me thinking that I can’t be writing just for the brilliant actors you are developing the roles for,” he added. “You can’t actor-proof your script, but I’d have written that character slightly differently to prevent those problems.”
Many playwrights willingly entrust their words to directors and actors of secondary productions, expecting most professional theaters in America to respect the licensing contracts they signed. Oftentimes, requests for changes are fairly minor, and many writers say they learn to step back.
If a play is like an author’s child, said David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”) “you can’t helicopter parent them forever.”
“At some point you have to cede control,” added Lynn Nottage (“Ruined,” “Sweat”). “And there’s some beauty in creating a piece of art that has a life beyond me, for other people to build on my ideas.”
Sarah Ruhl (“In the Next Room, or the vibrator play”) said a playwright must be trusting to survive. “One of the joys of theater is the collaboration,” Ms. Ruhl said. “I make stage directions more about intention than instructions.”
While few playwrights go as far as Albee and Samuel Beckett in controlling their texts, Mr. Joseph said he sometimes feels the need to include more explication of character, motivation and tone to ensure his play will remain his. And like Mr. Joseph, Ms. Nottage acknowledged that she is more prescriptive now than when she was younger.
Still, she said, even when she thinks she has “laid out enough clues” some directors require explicit instructions. The love between Esther and Mr. Marks in her 2003 “Intimate Apparel” should remain unconsummated as written. Yet she once received a letter from an audience member who saw a production that culminated with the characters making out.
“I wrote the show to say that was not permitted,” Ms. Nottage said.
Often a playwright will discover pitfalls earlier in the process. During readings of his “Rabbit Hole,” a play about coping with loss in a family, David Lindsay-Abaire found “emotionally indulgent” actors crying throughout, but he felt no tears should flow till the second act, if at all. “So I put a note in the published version saying this is not a play where people emote, they don’t cry,” he said.
Lucy Thurber (“Transfers”) works regularly with a core group of actors, but often turns to The Lark, a theater organization in New York that provides quality performers “who are not your everyday peeps” for readings.
“I can learn a lot from a good actor who doesn’t get my rhythm,” she said.
“I build off their takes on things or the way they might hit a word,” she added. “The specifications in my script come from there.”
Because of the shadings actors were giving her dialogue in “Scarcity,” she felt compelled to include a note that the character does not sexually abuse his daughter.
Like Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, Mr. Joseph said he dislikes crying out of turn. Watching so many tears spill during auditions for “Gruesome Playground Injuries” prompted him to add a note in the published version that the character of Kayleen should not cry — or if she does, she cannot let the character of Doug see it. “I wanted to nip that in the bud,” he said.
For playwrights, interpretation is one thing, but messing with the actual words in the script is another issue entirely.
“If they are changing the language I would shut it down,” said Ms. Ruhl. “If they honor my language and intentions then carpe diem.”
In some cases, stage directions and notes may not solve these problems since directors may arbitrarily break from the text. When Ms. Nottage learned that a production of “Ruined” in Florida was going to be, well, ruined — “The director felt the play was too long for a geriatric audience so they were cutting it down” — she issued an edict, saying in essence, if they wanted a shorter play they should choose a shorter play.
“They restored the text,” she added.
Ms. Thurber recalled a version of “Scarcity” in which “the director literally inserted staging moments and musical moments and put characters into scenes where they weren’t.”
Had she seen it early in the run she would have asked that it be shut down, but instead she settled for venting her anger at the director. Since then, Ms. Thurber has largely avoided productions of her plays in which she is not involved. “I go out of my way not to read press for other productions,’’ she said, “although sometimes I see posters online and it makes me feel uncomfortable.”
Google Alert, Mr. Lindsay-Abaire added, “is a terrifying thing.”
“It’s gratifying knowing your plays are being done,” he continued, “but you click on these links and you see production photos that look like they’ve been taken at summer camp talent shows.”
He worries as much about straightforward and sincere but poorly directed and miscast productions of his plays as he does about conscious butchering: “It hurts seeing your characters reduced to wacky caricatures. You can’t fly all around the country to each audience to say, ‘Oh no, it’s this and not that.’”
By contrast, Mr. Hwang and Ms. Nottage said they frequently enjoy seeing later productions of plays, with Ms. Nottage praising an amateur production of “Intimate Apparel” in Brooklyn Heights “that took a sensitive and nuanced approach.”
Many playwrights find that the most egregious directorial indulgences tend to occur abroad. “In Europe they do not see the word as sacred and distortion is permitted,” Ms. Nottage said, explaining that directors trained there view “text as a piece of clay to do whatever they want with.”
Ms. Ruhl’s “Eurydice” was performed in Germany with a major monologue cut and a new character added. “The actors wore clown makeup and the show ran two-and-a-half hours where my play was about 90 minutes,” she recalled. “I was dumbfounded and felt very lonely sitting through it.”
Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has learned to relish the absurdity of those productions. “To me the weirdo experimental version of my play is more forgivable because it’s such a clear and deliberate departure from my intent as a writer,” he said.
The “loopiest” interpretation Mr. Lindsay-Abaire ever saw was a YouTube trailer for “Good People” in Zurich with the characters dressed as superheroes.
“It was an insane avant-garde take on a very naturalistic play,” he said, adding with a laugh. “If they even licensed it I’m sure they were breaking every part of the contract.”
