Playwright Laurie Brooks Talks About Theatre
Author of "The Tangled Web" Discusses Playwriting and Youth Theatre
Jun 17, 2009
Watch Laurie Brooks’ stage plays, and you’ll experience a variety of stories – from new interpretations of classic myths to dramas that explore uncomfortable truths about teenage life. Her work has been honored by three Distinguished Play Awards and has been performed in New York, Washington D.C., and Ireland.
Suite 101 interviewed Brooks via email on June 9, 2009 and learned about her thoughts on youth theatre and playwriting. The following is an edited version of the interview.
S101: How did you become a playwright?
Brooks: I wrote my first play in graduate school at New York University. I took plenty of criticism and worked hard on it until my professor said, “Well, now I think you’ve got something.” He suggested I enter the play in a national competition. I did and won the first ever John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award from the New England Theatre Conference given to a play for young audiences.
That was pretty encouraging so I entered the play in another competition and was fortunate enough to have the script developed at The Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices Symposium. It was a play adapted from a short story written by my brother, New York Times best-selling author, Terry Brooks, called Imaginary Friends. It premiered in Ireland at Graffiti Theatre Company under the title, The Riddle Keeper.
S101: What are the qualities playwrights need to succeed?
Brooks: Many of the basic tools of narrative fiction – fully realized characters, careful plot development, plenty of conflict and action, contradiction and the unexpected, forward motion and tension – are necessary for the playwright too.
But a playwright must understand what theatre does best, which is to ask the audience to use its imagination [and] “suspend their disbelief” in order to lose themselves in the action of the play. I am not as interested in naturalistic theatre as I am in creative use of the theatre space, a place where anything can happen.
S101: You also design after-play forums. What can people expect in these?
Brooks: Some years ago I went alone to a production of Tony Kushner’s play Slavs in Chicago. I was utterly mesmerized by the ideas in the play and was eager to talk about them, so I turned to the couple sitting next to me and engaged them in conversation.
They thought I was crazy, but I realized in that moment that the play may be over, but the experience, if it is a challenging one, is not. So I began to experiment with various forms of engaging the audience in an after-play experience.
When people ask me what the forums are like I say, “Imagine a theatre filled with people and twenty or thirty of them are standing up waiting for their turn to speak about what they have just experienced and the ideas that have been presented.
I have been deeply influenced by the work of Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, who believed, like I do, that the audience at a theatre event can be more than spectators. It is an amazing experience to hear an audience talk about the ideas, ethics and character choices in a play.
S101: How do you feel youth theatre has evolved?
Brooks: When I first started writing there was no such thing as young adult theatre. Many teens went to the theatre but there were no original plays being written especially for them.
My play The Wrestling Season was one of the forerunners of the movement to create theatre that lived in the authentic world of teenagers and was the first play to take on issues of sexual orientation through an exploration of the destructive power of rumors and innuendo. It definitely pushed some boundaries.
After that play, I wrote three more to make a quartet of challenging plays for young adults. Deadly Weapons tells the story of three teenage friends and a dare that goes terribly wrong. The Tangled Web explores how far one teenage girl will go to get what she wants, and Everyday Heroes, commissioned for the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, tells the story of two brothers and a devastating fire and explores what can happen when the distorted truth of the media becomes more valid than reality.
However, in the last few years there has been a movement away from edgier work in the theatre. Part of that is politics and part of it is economics. Theatre must first get “the butts in the seats,” as we say, to make payroll at the end of the week.
But I believe the pendulum will swing again toward more challenging work. In the meantime, I’m continuing to write edgy, original plays for young people and have been fortunate enough to find producers who still take risks with new material.
Learn more about Laurie Brooks’ work as a young adult writer at From Stage Play to Young Adult Novel.
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