Feedback

by Jeff Sweet

This article was originally published in the September/October 2000 issue of The Dramatist, and is currently available in Jeff Sweet's new book Solving Your Script, published by Heinemann. You can find out more about Jeff Sweet at his web site www.jeffreysweet.com. This article is reprinted here by permission of the author.

The literary manager of the Dilson Valley Repertory Theatre calls you with good news. She likes your play. The company would like to put up the money to fly you out and provide you a berth in a comfy bed-and-breakfast while you and the director they’ve assigned you work together. This is part of a series, she tells you. One Monday night each month, the company’s members, subscribers, and friends gather to watch a group of actors with scripts in-hand do a rehearsed reading of a new play. After the reading, she (the literary manager) leads an audience discussion, with the writer participating – a talk-back.

My opinion? Readings are great. If you’re offered one and have sufficient reason to believe that you’ll be working with good actors, grab the opportunity.

More opinion? Improperly run, talk-backs are often either worthless or destructive. If you have to agree to the talk-back to get the reading, grit your teeth and do so, but prepare yourself for the likelihood that you’ll have to sit through a lot of advice, mostly well-intended but also often aggravating.

I’m not saying that the audience has nothing to tell you. I’m saying that the audience tells you most of what it has to tell you during the reading itself. You watch their posture – when they’re leaning forward and when they’re slumping. Look for when a rash of confusion spreads across their faces. Note whether they laugh, and whether they laugh when and how you hoped they would. Try to gauge when the play lands and when it fails to connect. It is while your piece is being given this little bit of life in front of a group of (one hopes) perceptive and sensitive people that you’re likely to get valuable information. Usually, not during the talk-backs.

However, talk-backs are not really for you, the writer. Frequently, they are required by the grant that is subsidizing the series, or they are part of a theater’s desire to increase the audience’s emotional investment in the company. Most of all, talk-backs are for the audience. The opportunity to instruct and enlighten artists can be very satisfying. “They’re looking at me. They’re listening to me. They’re paying attention to me.”

Nothing wrong with this – everybody needs to be validated – but the ability to express an opinion is not the same as the ability to express an opinion of value.

Truth to tell, though, in the years I’ve been participating in talk-backs (either as the writer or someone drafted to be moderator), I can remember only a handful of times when a member of the audience has come up with a suggestion that might help the writer deal with revisions. Although, why should one assume that people who haven’t made a study of technique are likely to offer much guidance in technical matters? They aren’t experts on the building of plays. What they can offer you with authority is testimony on the effect a play has on them, and this they have done during the reading itself. To expect them to tell you how to solve your first-act curtain is akin to expecting them to offer a composer useful guidance on how to develop an orchestral pieces after hearing the playing of a piano sketch.

This is not to say that I haven’t heard some spirited discussions about the themes implicit in the play. Sometimes, in one of these sessions, you get a vivid portrait of the community you’re visiting – their values, fragments of personal lives, some sense of an issue that is making the citizenry choose sides. This can be fascinating from a sociological point of view and may give you a wider understanding of what is going on in our society (not a bad thing, if you see part of your job as dramatist to reflect these kinds of tensions in your work).

However, when it comes to commenting on your play –

I saw a movie on TV last week that dealt with the same issue, and in that one, they all co-operated to take care of the old lady together.”

I thought the first half was kind of funny, but I got kind of bored with the last half-hour, except when the girl with the orange hair was on.”

The aunt seemed to me to be the most interesting person in the show. Why don’t you make the play about her?”

Do you really need to use that language?

If you ask for the audience’s reactions, the bulk of what you’re going to get will be along these lines – a lot of “I liked this” and “I didn’t like that” with some general adjectives tossed around. As I’ve said, if you’ve been sensitive to the audience during the reading, you don’t need them to tell you what they did or didn’t like, you already know. I find adjectives to be the junk food of criticism – mostly devoid of nutritive content.

However, if you have to submit to a talk back, and if you can have some input into the process, here are a couple of suggestions.

Try to confer ahead of time with the literary manager about the way it will be run. If you can, for God’s sake, keep her from opening the session by asking the audience, “What do you think?” That’s an invitation to the kind of stuff I quoted above. Instead, formulate some questions to ask the audience, specific questions like “Who do you think the central character of the play is?” “What do you think she wants?” “At what point did you realize the nature of the relationship between Morris and Beverly?” “If you had to summarize the theme of the play in a sentence, what would it be?”

Notice that none of these questions is intended to elicit a response about the quality of the work but rather about what the audience thinks it understands of the information you’ve placed on the stage. Oh, they’ll sneak in an adjective or two anyway, but you may actually get some insight into the gap between what you intended to convey and what they get. For instance, if you learn that the character Lena (whom you intended to be seen as the lead’s imaginary companion) is being read by the audience as her real-life half-sister, that lets you know that there is something wrong with the way you’ve introduced Lena. The audience won’t tell you how to address the problem, but it’s useful to learn that the problem exists.

Whatever you do, when you’re sitting on that platform facing the audience, resist the impulse to defend your work. Resist the impulse to answer back to someone who bruises your feelings or insults your baby. You probably don’t know who that person is. He could be the artistic director’s boyfriend. She could be a member of the board and might have something to say about the budget for the next season. Theater is by definition a social phenomenon, and given the way so many of us are connected, it generally is a good idea not to make unnecessary enemies. (Odds are that you will encounter enough necessary enemies. Save your strength and feistiness for them.)

If you do attempt to counter a criticism, I promise you that the person making the comment will repeat and rephrase it with more heat and passion, then others in the audience may join in, and a hailstorm will commence. In my experience, your best option is to respond with, “Hmm, that’s interesting. I’ll thing about that.” That man has just taken a chance by getting up in front of his neighbors, and he doesn’t want to appear wrong-headed or foolish. He wants to be heeded; he wants a signal that you respect him. If you say you’ll consider what he says, he sits down thinking that he has accomplished both, and you get to maintain the tactful illusion that you are open and fair-minded.

Good luck in Dilson Valley.

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