Five questions for an aspiring playwright

Last month, I mentioned my friend Janet Jiacinto, who was in my Playwriting class and who will soon be staging her self-written play, Chapstick Smells Like Fish. She recently gave me some insight into the process of writing a play and having the opportunity to perform it.

How did your concept for the play evolve in your head, before, during and after Playwriting class?

I was taking an EMF class where we were required to keep a dream journal. That was when I first started thinking about the concept of unspoken dream logic. This is the way, in dreams, you can be in what looks just like your living room, but it's not actually your living room -- it's a swimming pool or something.

Dream sequences happen all the time in movies, but I'm not sure I've ever seen or read something where the entire thing is a dream. I thought it would be cool to try to find a way to stay true to the world of dreams without becoming so convoluted that no one understood the story.

When analyzing a play, one of the first questions you should ask is "Why is this day different from all other days?" because if it isn't, not much is at stake. It's the same with writing. So, I stole some characters I liked from another play I've written and picked a day in one of their lives that they could never forget.

The feedback in Playwriting class and Playwriting Laboratory was absolutely vital to Chapstick's development in that it helped me to shape the characters and shifts in logic so that they made as much sense as possible without perverting the nature of the world.

When did you know that you wanted to potentially produce it?

I sincerely doubt the existence of professional playwrights who work on plays with the idea that they'll never see a stage. I can't write a play without visualizing it in a certain space. I've been working on Chapstick for roughly a year, it's gone through three workshop readings, and I reached the point where I had a script and wasn't sure how else to make it better.

Since the setting is so minimalistic, it is an extremely easy play to produce. The challenge is in making the world something easy for the audience to understand. The production will be more like a workshop in that I want to stage it to find problems in the script that wouldn't be obvious for a reading.

Do you think that since it's a bit abstract to most people, students will respond positively to it?

I certainly hope so. The story walks this fine line between ludicrousness and realism and in doing so finds this place where we can believably say and do things we never would in reality.

Has any particular play, playwright or other person or thing inspired your work?

Every character in the play is based, however loosely, on someone I've really known -- even Ashu, the character who ranges from Sean Connery to a cartoon.

What do you hope to do by producing your play at TU?

By putting a play into the hands of actors and designers, new things will be found in the script. A lot of things the playwright didn't intend to put in the play suddenly become unspeakably important. Stage directions are a whole different world when they're no longer words on a page. Unless the story is completely antiquated, a play is not meant to be read but seen. That's why I believe every play should be forced through at least one workshop performance before it's declared to be a final draft.

Janet's play will be performed as part of Towson University's 2009 Fall Season. (Photo courtesy of Janet's facebook page.)

--DQ