Writing for Theatre as an Outsider

Posted By Christopher Demos-Brown,
Playwright for When the Sun Shone Brighter

I’m both a theatre insider and an outsider—an insider because I love theatre and write for it, but an outsider because I’m also a practicing lawyer.  Having one leg outside of the theatre world allows me to escape from the echo chamber that it—and every world—breeds.  Whatever you do for a living (medicine, law, advertising, teaching) there’s a tendency for your mind to ossify around certain beliefs and attitudes.  And often with dire consequences.  You’re thinking:  “How outside of theatre can this guy be getting all theatry on us so fast.”  OK.  Remember about a year ago, this country was plunged into the worst recession in eighty years by the financial geniuses in Washington and on Wall Street?  Remember the pilots who were playing with their laptop instead of landing the plane?  Tiger Woods?  All trapped in their respective echo chambers and feedback loops where the views inside their little worlds became divorced from the way the outside world sees things. 

And it happens in the theatre too.  Is there something about the play Speed-the-Plow, for example, that makes it particularly relevant to what’s happening in contemporary America?  Something to explain the fact that this twenty-year-old play is suddenly being revived in every region of the country at the same time?  I mean… it’s an excellent play and all, but now?  Everywhere?  Gotta be the echo chamber. 

The theatre community prides itself on its openness and daring, but inside the echo chamber, I see a lot of assumptions, biases, preferences, taboos, and stale ideas, just like in any other profession.  Unspoken rules that theatre must be politically liberal, that it must challenge conventional forms, that it must appeal to the masses.  As an outsider I don’t buy these assumptions.  I think theatre should aim at the elite.  I think it can espouse any view a writer has provided it’s done with skill.  I think most of the great plays I’ve ever seen adhere closely to conventional structure and do little to push the parameters of form.  Theatre, at its core, is about people in a room watching other people pretend with all their heart.  How those two groups interact depends on so many things—the quality of the material, the skill of the artists, what the audience members had for dinner, etc.  And when it all clicks just right, I still think it’s better than any other entertainment experience. 

My two best nights at the theatre were seeing The Music Man on Broadway and Oleanna in a crummy cabaret style room at the already-on-the-skids Coconut Grove Playhouse.  I’m not much for musicals, but the angels of the art were in the room the night I saw The Music Man.  The entire cast—from twelve-year-old kids to octogenarians—took a curtain call playing trombones.   Fifty cast members beaming with pride that they’d learned to play “Seventy-Six Trombones.”  Jesus—it was fantastic!  Oleanna, Act III.  An old man in the audience stood up and yelled “Bitch!” at the female character.  Mamet had us by the Adam’s apples!  (That play’s the most effective “sensitivity training” I’ve ever seen and I’ve never interacted with a woman in the workplace quite the same way since).

That’s what it can be.  That’s what I, as an outsider, want to experience, and, as an insider, strive to create (regardless of the “rules”).  The lump in the throat.  The belly laugh. The epiphany.  The deep longing of first love.  Dread.  Insight.  Wonder.  Joy.  All the stuff we outsiders push out of the way while we’re busy taking out the garbage and paying the bills.  And sometimes all it takes… is a bunch of trombones!

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