[jfengel]

Ugh. I hate it when the playwright comes to shows. They always have opinions.

Their work is over. The words are set. Now let me do my job, figuring out how to say them and how to move. It's between me and the director. We're the ones who can see the set, know the other actors, feel what the audience is responding to.

One thing I love about doing Shakespeare: he's very sparing with stage directions. He lets the words speak for themselves. Often, they suggest how I should sound, when I should be silent, how to move. But he rarely enforces an action on me. And even better... because he's dead, he's not going to come at us if we cut something we don't like, or rearrange.

Modern playwrights love to tell me when to take a (beat). Guys... you wrote the words. I'll figure out how fast to say them. You did your job. Now stay home and let me do mine.

[thefaux]

This comment comes across as arrogant and dismissive of authors. Maybe this is a common attitude in theater but it doesn't come across as very collaborative from the outside.

[jfengel]

It was intended to come off as exaggerated for humor, but clearly that didn't convey. I'm sorry for that.

That said... most of the time, playwrights aren't supposed to collaborate with actors. It's not a one-to-one interaction. The playwright writes, makes it available through a service like Samuel French, and has no connection with the actual performances.

They may collaborate with actors and directors during the writing process. That's a different thing from the ordinary work of an actor.

Actors collaborate a lot -- with each other, with the director, with the lights and sound and tech and props. Adding one more voice -- even that of the playwright -- often makes it worse, rather than better.

In particular (switching to my director's hat rather than my actor's hat), it is important that I be the final word on the show. That sounds arrogant, and of course it is, but in a conventional theater process the director's job is to keep all of the other artists working together. That's what makes it look like a finished, cohesive work, rather than a collection of individual performances.

A common faux pas in theatrical circles is for a writer to bypass the director and give directions to the actors. That is very much a no-no. Actors work together, not as individuals, and a writer telling an actor something different from what the director tells them gives the work a disjointed feeling. If a writer has notes, they go to the director -- who has to be free to ignore them.

Writers, of course, chafe at this. And it's worse when they don't have experience as actors or directors themselves, because they don't know how the process works.