Playwright Mac Rogers on Making Large, Ambitious Plays

By Mac Rogers

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Shortly after I wrote my little bit about whether or not Angels In America could be produced today, playwright and ole china plate Mac Rogers mentioned that he had just come off a year in which he wrote and helped produce an epic science fiction trilogy.  We got to talking about it, and I asked him to weigh in here with his experiences.  Enjoy.)

Mac Rogers here, guest-blogging on Parabasis in response to Isaac's post  earlier this week on the Mike Boehm "Could 'Angels In America' happen today?" article in the LA Times. I highly recommend reading the whole article - in particular, the description of the ANGELS IN AMERICA development process is riveting - but the basic gist is: in this time of drastically reduced arts funding, could a little known playwright write - and hope to see produced - a play like ANGELS that is epic in both length and scope, with a large cast and a host of capital-I ideas? Are PITTSBURGH and KENTUCKY CYCLEs a thing of the past? Are all the plays now going to be sort of magical-realist urban comedies of manners where a painting or a math problem is a metaphor for the 90-minute problems of a cast of three?

 

I take this kind of personally. Starting in late 2010, I began writing an epic cycle of plays called THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY. The trilogy followed two generations of an American family in Florida before, during, and after an extraterrestrial occupation of the Earth. Earlier this year, my theater company Gideon Productions  produced this trilogy: Part 1 in January, Part 2 in March, and Part 3 in June. 

Is THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY comparable to ANGELS IN AMERICA in quality? Of course not, not even close. Forget shouting distance, it's not even in bellowing distance. But is it comparable in scope? Absolutely. The three HONEYCOMB plays span twenty years, involve twenty-four characters in total, and explore issues like occupation, insurgency, sexual identity, conscience, familial ties, terrorism, law, and probably some more stuff I'm not thinking of. This was not a campy show. This was, as several reviews noted, unapologetic science fiction, but it was also very serious science fiction. And as it happens, I see no contradiction between the two.

Now, to ensure that this post will be a total ego-wallow instead of merely a partial one, I'd like to tell you about the play I wrote and co-produced before THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY. It was called VIRAL. It was pretty messed up. How messed up was it? It was about three death fetishists who approach a suicidal woman to kill herself on camera for them. I thought basically no one would like this play. Instead, not only did some folks like it, but much to my surprise it was the play for which I have attracted by far the most industry attention. I had agents and directors taking meetings with me. The play was optioned for a time. So far nothing has come of this, but why this play?

Well, it had five characters. It had no intermission. It had an easily graspable - if wince-inducing - marketing hook. This twisted, creepy, clammy, bleak character study is by far the most marketable thing I've ever written. 

Because that's the market reality they teach us playwrights about nowadays. I didn't go to grad school, but this is more on the common-sense, industry savvy side of education. The regional theaters, the non-profits, the LORTS, whatever, if they have a budget for a large-cast show, they've already blown it on a Shakespeare or a musical or a Christmas show. For new plays, they want PROOF: small cast, good hook, personal rather than political/social issues, and the imprimatur of a successful run in New York City. So if you want your play produced, that's what you need to write. 

And I get it. Times are hard. Theater companies, even most of the bigger ones, aren't lavish organizations where they serve crab cakes in the break room. They're always fundraising, they're always agonizing over their seasons to make sure they can balance the risky shows with sure things. I'll never forget going to FLOYD COLLINS at a theater in Miami and seeing the AD make a curtain speech where he basically implored the audience not to leave at intermission. A flop can really hurt one of these companies. There's not a lot of rainy-day money out there. 

So for me to follow up VIRAL with a three-play epic with a zillion characters was just nuts, from a career point of view. If I had an agent, they'd tell me I was being ridiculous. And I knew it, I knew it going in, I knew it from the moment that I pitched the project to my Gideon co-producers. I knew there was basically no hope of a transfer or a second production, almost no chance that a science fiction trilogy for the stage would ever find a home in the commercial, non-profit, or regional worlds. It would cost a fortune to mount, and then how would they get their Yasmina Reza-loving audiences to even go see it? That's how badly I wanted to write THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY: I made a conscious choice to put my pursuit of a professional playwriting career on hold for close to three years. 

I knew THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY could likely only exist in indie theater, in this case as three Equity Showcase productions. Now, I'm very keenly aware - painfully so - that the indie theater and/or Equity Showcase model requires underwriting just as much as ANGELS IN AMERICA did back in the day. Not in the form of large grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, but instead in the form of a vast flotilla of extraordinary artists providing their time and talent for far less remuneration than they deserve. My company is proud that we pay a decent chunk above the required Equity minimum - it's certainly not a fortune, but it's a gesture to our performing, design, and stage management artists that their work is valuable to us - but it's only fair to say that THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY is made possible in part by a donation of great talent and hundreds of hours taken out of the personal lives of several dozen artists.

I'm willing to cede that much. If there's one way that I could think of our productions as "less than" in any way, it's that. The first thing we at Gideon would do with more funding is properly remunerate our colleagues. THAT SAID:

IT HAPPENED. I wrote it, we produced it, the three plays appeared on a public stage, several hundred people saw them, they were reviewed in a number of high-profile outlets, they were discussed, praised, pilloried, critiqued... but they happened. These were real productions. Can epic shows happen today? THEY DO. We're making them happen any way we can.

'Cause guess what? I didn't get the idea for an epic stage trilogy all by myself. I was INSPIRED, I was inspired by a wonderful playwright, an amazingly gifted colleague named Johnna Adamswhose superb ANGEL EATERS trilogy was produced by the irreplaceable Flux Theatre Ensemble in 2008. I didn't invent anything, I'm jumping on a train. 

In Boehm's article, he interviews Tony Taccone, one of the early champions of ANGELS IN AMERICA in his role as the Artistic Director of the Eureka. Taccone, now the AD of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, says:

It was just much easier to be poor back then. It feels now like you need $20,000 a year to wake up in this country, and kids are coming out of school with so much debt." Taccone said that in his conversations with beginning artists, "These kids are, like, 'I have to start my own brand,' creating tiny businesses that are not able to support you full time; you scale back your expectations to do little projects that you self-produce, to get your little niche audience, your Facebook following. The spirit of it is cool, it shows ambition and drive and creativity, but it's just so compromised. There's just a huge lack of resources that has an immediate impact on what they can aspire to.

I kinda lost my mind for a second when I first read that quote. It read to me as breathtakingly condescending. Oh, is our spirit cool? Are we showing ambition and drive, Mr. Taccone? Would you like to pinch our cheeks and buy us a creme pop? I recognize my own ridiculousness here; at 38, I'm clearly not one of the "kids" he's talking about, but that is what my colleagues and I are doing: building our band on social media, finding our audience within the budgetary confines we're dealing with. With a day or two to take a deep breath, I can see that the main spirit of Taccone's quote is concern rather than condescension, but seriously: what does he think we should do? There's not enough room for everybody in Taccone's world. Are the rest of us just supposed to go home?

I write epic science fiction for the stage. I couldn't possibly be writing in a less fashionable genre for theater. There's no money for it, and middle-aged folks with discretionary theater ticket money don't want to see it. The grants are half dried up. BUT WE DID IT. We produced it. Each part ran three weeks apiece, BUT IT HAPPENED. Not in a vacuum, in the actual world. People came to see it, reviewers came to review it, we won an award for Part 1. I'm simply not willing to accept that because it wasn't at a high profile theater buoyed by a hefty grant that it didn't really happen, or that articles like this can be published without any curiosity about what some of the smaller theater communities are up to. 

Look, this is sounding like I'm grumpy or ungrateful. I'm not. THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY was one of the three or four most exhilarating, creatively fulfilling processes of my life. I got to work with wonderful people (including my wife Sandy, whose set designs were better than the scripts). I'm so profoundly lucky to have had this in my life, and I'm grateful every day. If nothing else ever happens with HONEYCOMB I won't have a scintilla of a reason to complain. Having completed it, I've never felt so empowered, so adventurous in my entire life. 

But when Tony Kushner says he couldn't have written ANGELS while juggling other demands, he's wrong. Read ANGELS, watch it. That's the work of an artist who is profoundly compelled. If Kushner worked a full-time job every day (as I've always done), I am certain - CERTAIN - he would have still written ANGELS IN AMERICA. He would have found a way. When Todd London (of OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE fame) says "There are a lot of writers in America writing with great ambition and political acumen, but I'm not sure many of them, especially unknown ones, have the freedom to write plays of that size and duration," he's wrong. The freedom exists. You have to pay a price, but you can do it. We're out here. We're doing this stuff that the bigger guys can't afford to do anymore. There's another side to this story.

Comments

[cgeye]

Where can I buy a copy of your trilogy?

I need: Hope.

[Mac]

Hi cgeye! Unfortunately it is not for sale in any form at the moment, but if you contact me at mac dot rogers at gmail dot com I'll be happy to email it to you. Or if that creates anonymity problems is there someone I can send it through?

[Nat Cassidy]

Great conversation, guys. Lord knows this is something I think about all the time, as well. I'm always taken aback whenever some industry person reads a script of mine and says, "I love it, but it's just not producable," when in fact I just produced the damn thing for an aglet myself. It's doubly frustrating to know that any given commercial musical, even a small one, costs a literally insane amount of money to be produced, and that any number of overly ambitious straight plays could be covered by that kind of budget. Call me naive, but if there was just more of an effort to sell new, exciting plays to tourists and patrons, the audiences would come - it doesn't all have to be THE THING YOU ALREADY HEARD OF: THE MUSICAL, which, to my mind, though it gets some of the easy consumers in, loses a good chunk of people that would otherwise be willing to see something new and exciting. (Of course, something's gotta be done about ticket prices, too, but that's a whole 'nother conersation.)

That being said, though, and while I'm trying to cater my newer scripts to these more "commercial" constraints, I feel like there's always hope for our more ambitious works. I just got back from the first-ever regional production of my script ANY DAY NOW at a theatre that had no connection to me whatsoever, in a state I'd never even visited before, and it was fantastically received. ANY DAY NOW, which granted isn't a trilogy but almost might as well be, is a very full three-act, two-intermission epic about the zombie apocalypse and never leaves one family's kitchen. It first went up in January 2009 at the tiny Manhattan Theatre Source for about half of a song and has been scaring away producers ever since. Who knows if/where it'll ever be done again, but to see it be produced on a huge stage in a big-boy-sized theatre in front of an excited audience after so many people told me "I love it, but it's just not producable," it made me feel like less of an idiot for writing it.

By the way, this theatre found the script in a collection published by Martin and Rochell Denton's PLAYS & PLAYWRIGHTS collection. So, while writers like us, we may have scripts too difficult for the Off-Broadway producers, as long as we've got patron saints like the Dentons, we ain't alone in our quest for viability.

[Mac]

Nat, among the many great points you make here, I particularly take the point that "epic" doesn't need to equal "multi-part." I only wrote about multi-installment plays in my post (Angels, Pittsburgh, Kentucky, Angel-Eaters) but open out to single evening epics and there's a lot more to talk about: ANY DAY NOW, Gus Schulenberg's LESSER SEDUCTIONS OF HISTORY and JACOB'S HOUSE, Qui Nguyen's THE INEXPLICABLE REDEMPTION OF AGENT G, James Comtois's THE LITTLE ONE - and these are just off the top of my head and playwrights I know personally.