Playwright M.G. Stephens
M.G. Stephens brings his play Dorina's Story to METLab this year and we are excited to have him and his work! He was kind enough to discuss his work with us. Come see the readings of Dorina's Story by M.G. Stephens at the Maryland Ensemble Theatre on July 23rd and 28th at 8:30 PM.
Can you tell us about your beginnings as a playwright?
I have written plays for a long time, but for an even longer time I have also been a prose writer and poet. My playwriting is informed by those two other forms. I published my first novel Season at Coole when I was 26 years old, but didn’t have my first play Our Father performed until I was in my early thirties. My life in theatre, though, has informed all my mature writing, whatever form it takes. For instance, my best-known novel The Brooklyn Book of the Dead was directly influenced by my play Our Father having a five-year run at the West Bank Café’s Downstairs Theatre Bar on Theatre Row (42nd Street) in New York. My memoir Where the Sky Ends was likewise influenced by Our Father and The Brooklyn Book, in fact, I see them as a discrete trilogy (discrete in the sense of being discontinuous in their forms, although their contents are similar). But theatre has been in my blood since I was a boy. I used to love to put on shows in an abandoned garage when I was 5 years old, making my own puppets and getting marionettes and even doing some ventriloquism. I charged five cents admission and used to fill the garage each summer with an enthusiastic audience of local kids.
What’s something unique or fun about your process that you would be willing to share with us?
My formal training was in theatre at Yale School of Drama where I studied playwriting, dramatic literature and theatre history. But I think the fifteen years I spent living in London was my real training in theatre. In London, theatre is very much a part of everyday life. People go to the theatre in a quite natural and casual way. Because I know a lot of friends in theatre, I often got tickets to see shows, and so I have been a regular theatregoer from the beginning in London. I also taught theatre history and playwriting at the University of London for a brief time, and during that job, I went to the theatre virtually every day, as it was part of the remit to do so. That was not so much a job as seeming to die and going to heaven. I learned from all my years of living in London that theatre is best when it springs to life organically, without too many preconceptions of what will work or not.
What is your experience with play writing workshops like METLab either with this piece or another?
I attended Drama 47 at Yale, which is the playwriting workshop in which Eugene O’Neill cut his teeth when he was a part-time student at Harvard, where the course first originated early in the 20th century. My writing teachers for that class were John Guare, Arthur Kopit, and Derek Walcott. But it was also taught in collaboration with the drama critic Richard Gilman and the director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, et al.). We learned that playwriting was about collaborating with others, including a director and actors, but also set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, and others. We were taught that playwriting was a highly esteemable act, not a marginal activity. Although I remain skeptical about the value of poetry and prose workshops, both as participant and moderator, I also remain dedicated to the playwriting workshop as the ideal way to develop a play into a full production. A workshop is the building block from which all other levels of the play first spring.
How did this specific play come about?
Dorina’s Story came about while living in London. Last summer I had become friends with a Rumanian writer whom I helped to translate and get published and we were friends for a while, until shortly after a similar brunch which she gave for her friends, some of whom resemble the people in my play. I combined the energy and humor of that Sunday brunch with some ideas I’ve had for a long time about writing, using some commedia dell’arte types (il dottore, il professore, and the ingénue, specifically). This was combined with seeing a very good outdoor version of Chekhov’s Seagull in Regent’s Park in London. I began to write some notes after the brunch, and basically I kept writing until the play was completed. The last scene is inspired by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which I find delightful, and which I saw, again last year, in a production at the National Theatre. I wanted to write the play realistically in the beginning, but have it drift more and more towards a kind of pure poetry found in surrealism, which a Rumanian friend once told me was the national religion of their country.
What are you hoping to gain from this process and working with METLab’s Plays in Progress Festival?
I hope to gain insight into how to revise the play to make it stronger. I am also looking forward to working again in an American theatre after almost exclusively working in the British theatre for the past fifteen years. I am an American playwright and I am so excited about collaborating with everyone at the METLab’s Plays in Progress Festival. I was born in Washington, D.C., and my first glimmers of life were spent in Greenbelt, MD before my family moved back to Brooklyn. In that sense, coming to Maryland and working with a theatre there is a bit like a homecoming. I can’t wait to be there.
Can you tell us about your beginnings as a playwright?
I have written plays for a long time, but for an even longer time I have also been a prose writer and poet. My playwriting is informed by those two other forms. I published my first novel Season at Coole when I was 26 years old, but didn’t have my first play Our Father performed until I was in my early thirties. My life in theatre, though, has informed all my mature writing, whatever form it takes. For instance, my best-known novel The Brooklyn Book of the Dead was directly influenced by my play Our Father having a five-year run at the West Bank Café’s Downstairs Theatre Bar on Theatre Row (42nd Street) in New York. My memoir Where the Sky Ends was likewise influenced by Our Father and The Brooklyn Book, in fact, I see them as a discrete trilogy (discrete in the sense of being discontinuous in their forms, although their contents are similar). But theatre has been in my blood since I was a boy. I used to love to put on shows in an abandoned garage when I was 5 years old, making my own puppets and getting marionettes and even doing some ventriloquism. I charged five cents admission and used to fill the garage each summer with an enthusiastic audience of local kids.
What’s something unique or fun about your process that you would be willing to share with us?
My formal training was in theatre at Yale School of Drama where I studied playwriting, dramatic literature and theatre history. But I think the fifteen years I spent living in London was my real training in theatre. In London, theatre is very much a part of everyday life. People go to the theatre in a quite natural and casual way. Because I know a lot of friends in theatre, I often got tickets to see shows, and so I have been a regular theatregoer from the beginning in London. I also taught theatre history and playwriting at the University of London for a brief time, and during that job, I went to the theatre virtually every day, as it was part of the remit to do so. That was not so much a job as seeming to die and going to heaven. I learned from all my years of living in London that theatre is best when it springs to life organically, without too many preconceptions of what will work or not.
What is your experience with play writing workshops like METLab either with this piece or another?
I attended Drama 47 at Yale, which is the playwriting workshop in which Eugene O’Neill cut his teeth when he was a part-time student at Harvard, where the course first originated early in the 20th century. My writing teachers for that class were John Guare, Arthur Kopit, and Derek Walcott. But it was also taught in collaboration with the drama critic Richard Gilman and the director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, et al.). We learned that playwriting was about collaborating with others, including a director and actors, but also set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, and others. We were taught that playwriting was a highly esteemable act, not a marginal activity. Although I remain skeptical about the value of poetry and prose workshops, both as participant and moderator, I also remain dedicated to the playwriting workshop as the ideal way to develop a play into a full production. A workshop is the building block from which all other levels of the play first spring.
How did this specific play come about?
Dorina’s Story came about while living in London. Last summer I had become friends with a Rumanian writer whom I helped to translate and get published and we were friends for a while, until shortly after a similar brunch which she gave for her friends, some of whom resemble the people in my play. I combined the energy and humor of that Sunday brunch with some ideas I’ve had for a long time about writing, using some commedia dell’arte types (il dottore, il professore, and the ingénue, specifically). This was combined with seeing a very good outdoor version of Chekhov’s Seagull in Regent’s Park in London. I began to write some notes after the brunch, and basically I kept writing until the play was completed. The last scene is inspired by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which I find delightful, and which I saw, again last year, in a production at the National Theatre. I wanted to write the play realistically in the beginning, but have it drift more and more towards a kind of pure poetry found in surrealism, which a Rumanian friend once told me was the national religion of their country.
What are you hoping to gain from this process and working with METLab’s Plays in Progress Festival?
I hope to gain insight into how to revise the play to make it stronger. I am also looking forward to working again in an American theatre after almost exclusively working in the British theatre for the past fifteen years. I am an American playwright and I am so excited about collaborating with everyone at the METLab’s Plays in Progress Festival. I was born in Washington, D.C., and my first glimmers of life were spent in Greenbelt, MD before my family moved back to Brooklyn. In that sense, coming to Maryland and working with a theatre there is a bit like a homecoming. I can’t wait to be there.