Playhouse Tuesdays: The Road to Vichy, France

by erica wachs, prose reader

Dear Playhouse Tuesdays,

It’s 2 am, and my dog is the only one crazy enough to stay up with me. There are typos on the page in front of me, but they are all fixable; right now, I’m focused on just getting thoughts onto the page.

Rewrites take time. There’s the preciousness of a first draft, the desire to maintain everything as it was originally. There’s the fear that edits will filter the inspiration out of the work, that the reason you started writing in the first place will get edited out. Writing is strange like that, at once so solitary—the decisions I make about what character says what in the middle of the night—and so public—how I am always writing with an eye or ear to those who will see or hear the work in the future.

Next month, I’m going to have a reading of a play I started to write last summer. I’m excited and also anxious; the thought ushers both types of butterflies into my stomach. The play started off as a long 21-page scene at a playwriting retreat I went on in May. We didn’t have much time to edit or workshop before 5 minutes of our work was performed. I developed the show at my summer playwriting class this summer, where people were continually confused by what I was trying to say and the people I was trying to say it with.

I would try to explain the idea that I’m writing about Gertrude Stein during WWII in Vichy, France because she treats her Judaism the way I, and so many other Jewish teenagers, treat their Judaism today, and it would make a semblance of sense, but the scenes got lost in discussions about hats and Picasso and soup. If the play sounds a bit pretentious, that’s because it was—a pretentious, confusing mess of me parading that I spent three weeks last semester reading Gertrude Stein.

I had another chance to workshop the play with the same playwriting group with whom I went on retreat. It was a different environment this time: people I knew, people I wanted to impress, people I care about and whose work I greatly admire. While there were moments that stood out to the workshoppers—how invested in art my play was, how there was an air of an active threat, coded language—there were too many questions, too much confusion. The script fell flat again. I cried to my mom that I wasn’t good enough.

I’ve been in workshops before, ranging from my creative writing club in high school to courses I’ve taken throughout college. In high school, I learned to build up my tolerance, that my work wasn’t precious even though it felt special, that critique is typically to make good work better. In college, things are more complicated—because I am improving for a grade, there is ultimately someone who will deem my work as good or not good (though many of my professors throughout the years have emphasized how subjective, how non-binary creative work is).

And though my play had a strong foundation, and an innovative idea, and everyone at the workshop was kinder to my play than my play deserved, I ran away from my notes, and from the draft, and from writing. For weeks throughout the semester, and my first week home from break, I didn’t want to look at the thing that failed me, even though everything I had learned in previous workshops up until that point was imploring me to not be so emotional about my work.

I am in the continual process of learning how to incorporate criticism. In my last two weeks of break, I opened the document with all the notes that my wonderfully talented workshopping peers and friends had given me. They were right about every single confusion. I rewrote. My dog kept me company. The hats and Picasso have made it into my rewritten draft, but they have significance now. The play has an arc; it feels more full.

I still harbor mixed feelings towards workshops. They are effective, and they produce the rewrites that lead towards a final draft, but I am still learning to view a critique of my work as just that—not as a critique of me.

And yet, I can rewrite pages just as I can rewrite the parts of my life that are confusing or pretentious. I want my life to have art and Gertrude Stein in it, and decidedly more hats.

Until next month,

Erica

#ericawachs #playhousetuesdays #playwriting