In May I completed the first year of a two-year MFA program in dramatic writing at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Over the last few weeks I've inventoried not only the worth of what I produced during that year but also the worth of the whole playwriting endeavor over five years since I started my "50-year sabbatical."

This summer I am experimenting with what I call "Phase 2." I am experimenting with drawing a line between "Phase 1," which contains everything I have ever written to date that was done without benefit of "instruction," and this new phase, which feels driven by a need to write a theatre that has more ballast, balls, and brigand blood in its veins than what I currently see around me here in New York.

Wait -- I have to apologize for the somewhat Jeremiah tone of that last sentence.  You see, I have a Jeremiah in me who lurks in the desert that is sometimes my spirit, and he leaps out whenever despair about theatre begins to seep in.  And it seeps in often.  The main focus of the dramatic writing program at NYU is to equip its students with the tools to become successful commercial dramatic writers. However, this is not the same thing as helping people create theatre that will last, theatre that will enlighten, theatre that will help people rehearse surviving their own mortality (the way Nietzsche talks about the Greek theatre in The Birth of Tragedy). More often than not it births writing that is a product for consumption, grist for the entertainment mill or the next writing workshop, another plug-in for the "matrix" we call mistakenly call "culture."

The Marvelous Maria and I see this kind of theatre all the time, no matter how much or little the ticket price -- writing that has "movie" or "television" marbled all through it in its melodramatic subject matter and the rhythms of its phrasings and pacing. Some of it can be touching and entertaining, but a lot of it is boring because it recycles the limited topic list allowed by modern melodrama, such as dysfunctional families and the bruises of love (but not politics or history, except dismissively), and it draws from the limited paint-box of theatrical colorings known as "realism" so that the pieces begin to sound and feel the same no matter how different they may appear in form.

Thus the Jeremiah rails, and the Jeremiah resolves to write theatre that will matter to people, that will act on people's spirits in such a way that theatregoers will say, at the end of their time in the dark room of dreams and play, that they can date a distinct change in who they are from that moment forward, or at the very least say that they do not breathe the same way at the end of the evening as they did at the beginning. And the Jeremiah goes home and writes and writes and writes to try and bring such a theatre into being.

But the Jeremiah writes -- but I write -- steeped in a doubt that such a theatre can be written in today's culture when theatre is simply one of a thousand entertainment choices and not very high on the list. And I write with a sneaking suspicion that my Jeremiah has the odor of a prig about him, like most sermonizers, and that his call for a "higher theatre" is also a call for his own irrelevance.

So, contrary to what I penned above about producing a theatre with more testicularity and outlaw blood in its veins, Phase 2 is really (or is also) more about forking the writing road. On one path, what might actually "sell," and thus provide the means to support the other fork roadsigned "theatre that matters."

And even as I write this I hear my Jeremiah yell "Sell-out!" and flush me with a (little bit of) pricking shame.  It does feel like a falling-off from those original days when the joy that came from writing plays was a sufficient reason for writing the plays. "Being realistic" feels like a giving-up, "maturing" like getting smaller and more cautious.

But I also think that this is a dark wood I need to go through as a dramatic writer to regain some of that original ignition-energy, an obscurity (a "glass darkly") that will lead me to some spreadable light (and Phase 3). The doubt being wrestled with here is not about whether to write (writing for me is breathing) but how to balance the inevitable weighted obligations of life to friends and family with the more rarified (and perhaps ultimately useless) effort to create something of lasting worth and delightful craft.

©2003 Michael Bettencourt

For more commentary and articles by Michael Bettencourt, check the Archives.

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
Continued thanks to his "prime mate" and wife, Maria-Beatriz

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