They call it a play, but it’s hard work. While staging a theater production is by definition a cooperative enterprise in a shared space, the script that provides its foundation is most often a solo undertaking created in a private room.
Playwrights are the loners in this gregarious profession, and that’s why the Northampton Playwrights Lab exists. Founded 10 years ago by Meryl Cohn because, as she says, “I needed it,” it’s a group of serious theater writers at various career stages, who meet regularly to share work-in-progress and receive feedback from their fellow lonely toilers.
This weekend and next, the Lab goes public. Five of the members’ latest scripts, honed in the group’s critical but supportive crucible, are receiving staged readings under the umbrella title Play by Play. The full-cast performances feature a virtual who’s-who of Valley actors.
“I find the Lab to be stimulating, enlivening, and a really necessary community,” says Cohn, whose comedy-drama The Final Say, which “grapples with the question of who owns a story,” is part of the reading series. In addition to enjoying the benefits of bouncing her work off her colleagues’ ears, she says, she’s glad to be part of “a small community of people struggling with some of the same challenges.”
Eric Henry Sanders, author of Maybe, Probably, a comedy about expectant young parents in Park Slope, values the opportunity to hear his nascent scripts read aloud by Lab members and guest actors “in a really comfortable and warm environment. Until you actually hear it out loud, you can’t have the experience of knowing what it sounds like” and thus get a sense of where to “cut things and change things,” he says.
Leanna James Blackwell heads an MFA writing program, “so I’m working with [fiction and nonfiction] writers all the time, but it’s much harder for playwrights to find each other and collaborate.” Her play Curtain Call, “about actors, adultery, death and Venice,” received a final in-house reading last month before its upcoming Play by Play premiere. In the Lab, she says, “not only have I developed very meaningful working relationships, but I also get to be part of a development process. It’s transformed my relationship to my work, and to what I understand about how plays evolve.”
Tanyss Martula, founder of the Northampton 24-Hour Theater Project, is a charter member of the Lab. “I love the deadlines,” she admits — the discipline that gets the work done — along with the feedback that keeps it going. Her contribution to this month’s readings, Safe Lodging, is “a wacky drama of delusion, obsession, and Chihuahuas.”
Stephanie Carlson, author of Pleasure Cruise, a “farcical comedy with a classic heart,” is the only Lab member who is also an actor, so “for me it’s a rounded theater experience. They inform each other, the playwright and the actor, and I also think I bring an actor’s perspective that’s useful to the group.”
Harley Erdman, the newest Lab member, has recently returned to playwriting “after 15 or 20 years doing other kinds of things,” including teaching theater at UMass. The Lab, he says, is “not about product, it’s about process, it’s about sharing.” He finds it “very inspiring, how much talent” the group represents. “I’ve lived in Northampton for 20 years, and to be part of a group where some really good writers are producing exciting new work, that’s something meaningful to me.”•
May 7-9, 14-17, $5-$10 suggested donation, A.P.E. Gallery, 126 Main St., Northampton, Visit Play by Play on Facebook for more info.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann
