Talking Back: A Model for Postperformance Discussion of New Plays

The process of developing a new play typically involves some form of public reading of early drafts. For the most part, this is useful; the experience helps the writer answer questions about plot, character, theme, emotional involvement--all those elements that we take for granted when we ask, "Does the play work?" While sometimes these answers come to writers during the performance, it's become standard procedure to host public discussion afterward and to let the audience express its opinions. And this is where things start to go wrong.

Over the years, I have been involved in many such discussions in one of three roles: writer, audience member, and facilitator. Some of these sessions have been successful: the writer actually took away good ideas and came back later with a better draft. However, others have been so counterproductive and sometimes so painful that they derailed the writer; in one case, a promising writer was so discouraged and destroyed by her talkback that she stopped writing altogether.

Because many theatres and universities are involved in new play development, and because, as Head of Playwriting at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I am responsible for conducting them, I decided to develop a model for managing these talkback sessions.

I began with my own experiences. Thinking back to those sessions that helped me, I tried to recall why. Two factors quickly surfaced: how prepared I was for the session, and how well the facilitator handled discussion. In the first case, I had to be honest with myself: I sat through most discussions only because I felt I had to. For one reason or another, the theatre held them: "The audiences like them"; "It's part of our grant requirements"; "It's how the artistic director decides what he thinks of the play.") All I really wanted to hear was how brilliant the play was and whether or not the theatre would produce it. I wasn't there for development: I was there for glory. But on those few occasions when development was the issue, when I had gone into the reading hoping to learn two or three very specific things about the play, when I had some actual questions in my head--these sessions paid off. It is crucial, then, that the playwright is prepared to engage seriously with the play as a work in progress.

Similarly, the facilitator must be prepared to direct the discussion. In my experience, the facilitator usually hadn't prepared for the reading, but simply pulled from his drawer that musty set of stock questions that everybody uses: "What did you like?"; "Who was the main character?"; "How can we help this writer?" I realized that when the audience was asked these vague, conventional questions, they responded with answers that were equally vague and ultimately useless. On those rare occasions when the facilitator and I had spent time together looking for answers to specific questions, the discussion was vastly improved.

Also, the best discussions were those in which the facilitator was in control and not the audience. I recalled that every public discussion attracted what I call "destroyers," those long-winded, digressive, nit-picking nuisances who quickly derail a session. I catalogued these types (I'll say more about them later) and tried to understand how the better facilitators managed to forestall them and keep the discussion on track. Once again, it seemed to be a matter of preparing and asking the right kinds of questions.

The next step was to investigate what my colleagues were doing. To that end, I hosted a panel on this subject at the Mid-America Theater Conference in l998, and again at ATHE in l999. I also distributed questionnaires to members of LMDA and the playwrights' focus group of ATHE. I hoped to find, among all these responses, some common threads that might supplement my own conclusions.

Analyzing the reports and suggestions, I did find several recurrent ideas that helped me...