Kate Mulley

Theatre about the theatre seems like it has always had its place. Playwrights spend so much time living a life in the theatre that they sometimes find that the best material comes from within their world. The upside is that it’s honest and well-researched. The downside is that one can only see so many plays about a playwright struggling through their psychological issues.

I saw another one of these yesterday at the Bank Street Theatre (The Atmosphere of Memory) and left the theatre wishing that the playwright hadn’t felt the need to explore this particular play within a play. It’s fun to watch actors like Ellen Burstyn and John Glover play over the top parents who have made their son crazy through years of psychological warfare. It’s less fun to watch the playwright character storm around the stage like an overgrown 5 year old trying to discover what made him so unhappy and neurotic (halfway through I decided he was channelling Woody Allen, sigh)

We’re all guilty of writing about things that interest us. My writers group members make fun of me for writing about romantically challenged women in or obsessed with England as a default. Writing plays is a special form of narcissism. Not only are you taking something from your brain and assuming people will care, you’re making actors perform it, directors hone it, and designers provide you with whatever you came up with. The world can, in fact, revolve around you when you’re a playwright, however, anything that’s too self-referential risks alienating the audience (and not in a good Brechtian way) or worse, boring them. And so, I hereby resolve to never write a play about a playwright and his or her issues.

One of the problems with being a writer is the inevitable feeling of “what next?” when you’ve finished something. When Sezze Sun ended I felt like I had accomplished something monumental, but was also ready for a break. And then I had a 4 month writers’ block. I could not come up with a single original idea to write about. Until I was sitting on my couch reading an unpublished manuscript for a job that I didn’t get and came up with a title for a new play: “The Reluctant Lesbian“. And then I got excited and I started planning and scheming and figuring out what that play should be. In the past 6 months I’ve written some of it, I’ve researched a little, but mostly it has sat in my back pocket.

In the meantime, I started the NyLon Fusion Writers Collective and began writing my new play The Tutor. After last night’s reading, I realized that it’s not actually a one-act play, that it needs to be longer and much more fleshed out. I’m not sure I’m capable of writing a one act play, they always seem to be shadows of what they could be, rather than fully formed short pieces.

And then there are my dreams of renting a cottage somewhere with no internet or 3G network and banging out the witty romantic comedy I’ve been throwing around for a year or so.

So maybe ideas are like men and buses. You wait and wait and wait and then 3 arrive at once (the latter part of this analogy usually only rings true in London).