The Playgoer: Writers Strike a Wash for Theatre?

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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Writers Strike a Wash for Theatre?

Hooray for the settlement of the Writers' Strike. Especially since it turns out that despite some hopes it would send some Off Broadway expatriates back to the boards, many scribes (according the LA Times) found that well dried up when they returned to it...

David Rambo, [a] playwright ("God's Man in Texas") who gravitated to television several years ago as a writer-producer for "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,"....decided he would write a play that had been simmering in his head. Except, he discovered, the theater muse wouldn't take his calls -- not while he was burdened with anxiety from walking a picket line, uncertain what the future holds.

"I thought, 'Boy, am I going to write that play,' " Rambo said. But "I can't. I've tried, and I just can't. I don't know anybody who has."

Writing a play, he said, means having to "suggest a world with all the right details, the right words, the nuances. You have to get to a place of deep thought where those things can be discovered. I can't get to it with the stress of a strike."

Jane Anderson, a "media-hyphenate" who -- like many in L.A.'s creative set -- tries to carve out time for the theater work she loves amid the screenwriting and directing that earns most of her living, had an idea for a play germinate while she was picketing in the strike's early days. But it took nearly two months, she said, before she could find a "writing rhythm" to do something with it.

"Every writer I talked to who wanted to work on something said, 'I'm having the same problem too,' " she said.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Now I know what compromising and writing for the largest possible audience and getting a big fat paycheck does to ones creativity.

LOL,

IDHiccup