新GRE阅读能力提升素材分享贴二十八

KnightBM · 发表于 2012-2-3 23:42:25

The Playwright's Dilemma
Tony Kushner can't make a living writing for the stage. America's most prominent playwright confessed in an interview published in Time Out New York earlier this year that "Angels in America" doesn't pay the rent: "I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I'm surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don't think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don't think anybody does." So far as I know, Mr. Kushner is right. I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television. Itamar Moses, for instance, has written for "Boardwalk Empire" and "Men of a Certain Age," which isn't stopping him from turning out stage plays (his latest effort, "Completeness," just closed Off Broadway).

Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in Tennessee Williams's 'A Streetcar Named Desire.'

The question all but asks itself: Why is anybody still writing plays? Theater, after all, is no longer a central part of the American cultural conversation, the way it was when Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams walked the earth. Nowadays most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch "Breaking Bad" as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play—assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet.

So if you can't make any money writing for the stage, why bother? Putting aside the obvious attraction of being able to make up your own characters, I can think of one excellent reason: You meet the nicest people.

You've probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike. It's a lonely business, which explains why a few authors choose to collaborate instead of flying solo. Moss Hart, who wrote his best plays in partnership with George S. Kaufman, explained his decision to write with a partner in "Act One," his 1959 autobiography: "The hardest part of writing by far is the seeming exclusion from all humankind while work is under way, for the writer at work cannot be gregarious…. Collaboration cuts this loneliness in half. When one is at a low point of discouragement, the very presence in the room of another human being, even though he too may be sunk in the same state of gloom, very often gives that dash of valor to the spirit that allows confidence to return and work to resume."
To be sure, most playwrights, unlike Hart, write by themselves. Once a script is finished, though, they immediately plunge themselves into the endlessly pleasurable frenzy of a collaborative enterprise. Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage. What a playwright sees in his head may or may not be practical, especially if he's new at the game. It's the director whose job it is to spot problems before it's too late (or too costly) to fix them, as Eddie Dowling did when he advised Williams to cut the imaginatively conceived but impossibly elaborate onstage projections that the novice playwright wanted to use in the original 1945 production of "The Glass Menagerie."
In addition, the wise playwright goes out of his way to work closely with the actors who will appear in his play. No doubt you've heard all sorts of horror stories about Big Stars who only care about making themselves look good. The truth, however, is that actors, not playwrights, are the real professionals of the theater, the men and women who put themselves on the line each time they step into a spotlight. As a result of that experience, the best actors have developed a keen sense of what works on stage, one that is not infrequently sharper than that of the author who wrote their lines. When the script says one thing and an actor inadvertently says something else in rehearsal, a smart playwright will immediately ask himself, "Which way is better? Is her way more natural-sounding?"

Above all, a playwright gets to sit in the middle of a roomful of paying customers who are watching a stageful of actors perform his work. That can be terrifying, especially when something goes wrong in the middle of a show, but it's also the only way to learn how to get an audience to feel what you want it to feel. A novelist, after all, can fool himself into thinking that his book is devoid of dull spots. He'll never know what it sounds like to hear a hundred people squirming in their seats, waiting for something interesting to happen. Conversely, he doesn't get to hear his readers laugh—nor will he ever know the exquisitely serendipitous joy of hearing them laugh at a line he didn't know was funny.
If you want to make money, get a job. The pay is better, and so are the hours. Just don't expect anyone to clap for you when the five o'clock whistle blows.

__苫d · 发表于 2012-2-4 19:45:26

加油，每天努力！

[资料分享] 新GRE阅读能力提升素材分享贴二十八

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