Mean What You Say, Don't Say What You Mean

I always intended to attack the changing of lines as a separate post in the future, and it appears from the comment section that the future is now. But I’d like to address two things before I do.

One, the original message in my previous post got lost and diluted in the unexpected focus on changing lines. While I brought up that issue as the impetus for the post, it’s only one of many, many issues that contributed to the point I was trying to make which is first, foremost, and always: There Is No Excuse For Lazy Community Theatre. And *that* is what the focus of this blog will be.  Changing lines is a symptom, not the disease.

Second, my sincere thanks to Tami and Anonymous (yeah, I know who you are) for chiming in. I think it’s imperative to community theatre for these issues to be brought to the forefront and hashed out, and I appreciate the debate.

And now, at last, I get to the point of this post! Let’s begin by nipping in the bud this conspiracy to paint me as a fanatic.  (Yes, two people said it, so it is now a conspiracy!!) This was never about *one line* or even *one show*.  Of course I didn’t issue a pas d'armes over an isolated incident. I’m concerned about what I perceive to be a growing trend in community theatre: A cavalier disregard for the art of the script itself. 

Let’s tackle the legal argument forthwith. (I’ve been watching The Practice.) Federal copyright law explicitly prohibits making changes (unauthorized changes) to copyrighted material. When you pay royalties and obtain a license to produce the play, you sign a legal contract stipulating, as put by Samuel French, “The play will be presented as it appears in published form and the author's intent will be respected in production. No changes, interpolations, or deletions in the text, lyrics, music, title or gender of the characters shall be made for the purpose of production.” And again, even without this contract with Samuel French, there’s still the pesky little matter of Federal Copyright Law.

 

But hey, we’re artists! We’re rebels! We don’t let social norms and fascist laws made by The Man bring us down! Hey, I’m no uptight square. I’ve fudged the speed limit on more than once occasion, snuck food into a movie theatre, heck I’ve even carried an ice cream cone in my back pocket on a Sunday. (Ok, maybe not that last one. But I totally would if I had an ice cream cone. And a back pocket.) So maybe the legal argument doesn’t mean much?

Then let’s talk artist to artist. (Disclaimer: I am a writer and a director, but I am not a playwright.) Theatre is not a solo construct. What the audience sees on opening night (and at subsequent performances) is the cumulative effort of many artists, starting first and foremost with the playwright and her script. The script is a piece of art. The playwright is an artist. You have to respect both those concepts before reading on, or what I have to say from here on out will mean as much to you as the legal argument did. Every word of dialogue (stage directions are another discussion) was written the way it was written for a reason. The playwright is doing more than relaying a story through dialogue. The construction of each line of dialogue speaks not only to the story, but to the characters, to the tone, the atmosphere.  A painter doesn’t dip her brush in the closest pot of blue and then paint the sky. She chooses a particular shade to create an impression, a feeling. She chooses her brush strokes with equal care. So it is with a playwright’s words. 

Hence, what to make of an actor who changes the lines carelessly, without thought to the author’s intent? I see laziness. I see arrogance. I see someone who, frankly, doesn’t understand the art of theatre. It’s not the actor’s job to explain to the audience what the playwright meant. I see it all too often in theatre – switching a word or two around, ad-libbing a bit at the end – conveying the ideas that a) the audience won’t get it and b)the playwright didn’t know what he was doing. Instead, the actor should understand what’s behind the line and portray that with her vocal intonations, her body language, her facial expressions. It's lazy and lacking in artistry to change the line and feed the meaning to the audience instead of making it work as the playwright intended. If you think you can do better than the script before you, then by all means, go write a script. The world of theatre can always use smart, well-written scripts. But while you have someone else's work in your hands, don’t be so arrogant as to presume that you know better than the playwright. (And, to be blunt actors? Nine times out of ten, your line *isn’t* better.) 

All of this, of course, presumes that the script in hand is well-written, that it is worthy of the subjective label “art”. What if the script just doesn’t work as written? Well, the obvious solution is to simply not agree to do the script. But if you’re truly stuck with it (it’s happened to the best of us!), you are still under a legal and artistic obligation to respect the original work. A bad script doesn’t give a director carte blanche to go in with a machete and hack the script to bits to please our own whims, to cavalierly cut lines whenever it suits. "Cut it!" is not the rallying cry here, "Make it work!" is. You figure out a different approach to the script artistically, and you respect the agreement you’ve made with the playwright. Otherwise, you lack integrity as an artist. 

As an actor, and a director, it’s too easy to be blasé about the issue. After all, what actor has ever had their artistic contribution stolen, or misrepresented, or changed by an outside party? As actors and directors, we are artists, but we are artists who are part of a *collective work*. Understand that, respect that, and community theatre will not only survive, it will survive with integrity.