Playwright Ryan Patrick Dolan discusses "Bait Shop," a featured play in the Playwrights’ Festival.
One week into the rehearsal process for Bait Shop, Ryan Patrick Dolan rewrote the whole script.
Dolan’s featured play in the Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival is not typical of the writing process intended in the MFA Playwriting Program.
The program is structured so that each playwright will graduate with three full-length plays, Charles Smith, a distinguished professor of playwriting and head of the playwriting program, said. Dolan, a third-year graduate student studying playwriting, will be graduating with two.
Dolan has been working on Bait Shop for two years.
The play follows a 42-year-old man faced with a dilemma. Glen can either spend the rest of his life working at his bait shop in Michigan or follow his ambition and his heart to California with the woman he loves.
“You can get really caught up in, say, the rules of writing a play and kind of lose sight of the artistic side of how you create a story,” Dolan said.
Rewriting the script led to stress for not only Dolan but his cast and crew, as well.
“I had a cast waiting for a script. I had professors who were stressed, and I had professors who were mad at me,” Dolan said. “But bottom line … is I had an audience to deliver a script for.”
Smith said the theme of a play can develop and deepen throughout the process, but when the overall meaning changes, the playwright is in trouble.
“You can’t change the focus once you start the journey,” Smith said. “If you look at a play like being on a journey, like driving from here to New York, New York is your destination. You can’t halfway to New York say ‘Oh, I don’t want to go to New York. I want to go the Los Angeles.’ ”
Dolan said he used previous experience as an improv artist to deliver a new story with a focus on humor and relatable characters.
“Because of the improv, I’ve listened to so much comedy that I can hear the rhythm of the piece,” Dolan said.
Finding the holes in the script required Dolan to sit in the audience and simply listen. Rewrites come from the realizations that certain lines are “general” or “cliché,” Dolan said.
“Theoretically, when you are writing a play, you have something you want to say. You write the play to communicate something to your audience,” Smith said. “The revision process brings the play in line with what the playwright originally intended.”
After a professor approached Dolan about transforming the play into a sitcom, he realized the world he created for the stage for the stage could easily be adapted, which could lead to even more revision. With plans to move to Chicago or L.A. after graduation, Dolan said TV writing is his goal.
Though plays share some narrative elements with TV shows, the main difference between the two is that a play must answer a major dramatic question, Dolan said. In the case of Bait Shop, the question is: Will Glen go to California? In a show, writers do not need to pose that question, Dolan said, but if they do, it would be asked over the arc of a season.
“Plays should be focused, stories should be focused,” Smith said. “The audience should know what we’re waiting for.”
A playwright is never really done writing, he said.
Dolan gave Disgraced, a play written by Ayad Akhtar, as an example. Even after winning the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the playwright rewrote the play for Broadway and subsequent runs.
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True West by Sam Shepard — a classic in the American canon — even underwent major revision over a decade after its creation, Dolan said.
Smith said you have to approach a play as if it were music.
“When you pick up sheet music you have to imagine what it’s like in performance,” Smith said.
You have to imagine the instruments needed to create that music, just as you have to imagine the actors needed to create the “music of the play,” Smith said. It is also like music in that it can be “remixed,” he said.
“I hear Tchaikovsky played by someone today, and they are modifying it. Likewise, I see a play by Shakespeare today, and they are also modifying,” Smith said. “I don’t think it has to do with finishing the play. … But the question is like music: How are you modifying it to fit the production?”
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