The play's the thing

Test Tube Theatre's talented trio

by Bill Rodriguez

Rick Massimo

For a small city, Providence has more than its share of new work by playwrights. From the annual joint mini-fest of Trinity Repertory Company and Brown University's Steinberg Festival of New Plays, to Perishable Theatre's annual Women's Playwriting Festivals and occasional Blink short-play evenings, local bards in particular are doing well.

And now NewGate Theatre is presenting another opportunity, under their new artistic director this season, Brien Lang. Test Tube Theatre consists of three four-evening runs of full-length plays by three area playwrights. With minimal sets, the workshops are intended to help polish plays under development. (See "The lineup.")

The playwrights have all had plays staged in Providence. Tom Grady's Global Village was produced in New York last year by Playwright Horizons and the Dramatists Guild. A satire, American Cocktail, won the New England-wide Clauder Competition and in 1994 was workshopped at Trinity. A one-act, Opposing Roses, won the CODAC Award for Playwriting Excellence and had a staged reading at NewGate. A Faulkner specialist, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Bristol Community College.

Rick Massimo is receiving his MFA in playwriting from Brandeis University next month. He is founder and co-producer of Blink, evenings of 10-minute plays by local playwrights, a regular event at Perishable Theatre since 1993. In that series he has written a wide variety of pieces, from a conversation between shoe salesmen, involving a possible visit by Satan and a cryptic Faustian bargain, to the monologue of a man at a grindstone who is proudly describing his mind-numbing, work, to a Pinteresque conversation on a park bench, full of pauses and ambiguity.

Bill Lattanzi's New Englandish, an evening of one-acts, was performed last season at NewGate. At one time an assistant film editor for Woody Allen, he currently works at WGBH-TV as an editor and documentary producer. His plays, staged in New York and Boston, have included Idaho, Alaska, a comedy that won the Bradford College new play competition in 1996, and Dancing Downstream, which was described as "odd, funny, and delightful" in the Boston Globe.

Before a recent reception for Test Tube Theatre, the three writers sat down at NewGate to talk about playwriting.

Q: In your own plays, what kinds of things have you liked on the page but found needed improvement when you finally heard it read in workshops like this?

Grady: You're alone with the keyboard, and if the muse is working right it's sort of taking you over, and your superego isn't in there too much, and everything is cool, and, oh, it's brilliant. And then you hear them read it, and all of a sudden what you thought was character-driven was something else, and it was mostly your own therapy . . . That is a tremendous gift that you can have.

Lattanzi: I've found that the need to cut becomes obvious when you get it in front of people. When characters are onstage having an argument . . . it doesn't take much for people to get it.

Massimo: It all depends. I added 10 pages during this rehearsal process. Because you can be too oblique when you're writing for yourself.

Q: How supportive are Providence theaters, in the context of your experiences elsewhere and conversations with struggling playwrights who have wept with you over beers?

Lattanzi: I've worked kind of at this level in Boston and Providence and New York. In New York there are like a thousand shows down the street and the show opens and closes and there's absolutely no attention paid. In Boston there's some attention paid, and the tendency in the past has been to say, "Well, of course this is lousy because it's a new play in Boston." [Although] in the last year or two, the press has become more supportive. Here, there's a lot more attention paid, and the press has become more supportive. The story that I hear about Providence is similar to what I hear about Chicago, Seattle and other good theater towns, where it's not that the work is any better or any worse -- because I think the level's about the same in all these places -- but that people pay attention, people appreciate it more, people come out, people see it as worthwhile . . . I love Providence for that.

Massimo: Well, when I first started out writing plays I had to sort of make my own way . . . But at the same time, when I came with this idea for the Blink festival to [Perishable honcho] Marc Lehrman he had no reason in the world to say yes but he did. He issued the standard response that we always had there, which is: "Great idea -- if you want to do the work, go ahead and do it."

Q: How helpful do you think college writing programs are? Rick, you've finished one at Brandeis.

Massimo: It depends on where you go. But I think you will always learn something because you're surrounded by so many people who are committed to what they're doing. Eliza Anderson, a former teacher of mind who taught a class at Perishable where I got started, the day before I started graduate school she told me the best thing about it is that no one has ever cared so much that you write, and once you're out of there no one will ever care again as much that you write. On the other hand, you can run into people who really don't have your best interests at heart, will have all sorts of weird political agendas and that sort of thing.

Q: Tom, you have three screenplays and two teleplays in your drawer. How tempting is it to shift over to screenwriting, where the money and recognition is?

Grady: It is, for those very reasons. But if your first love is the theater, you'll always find a way of exercising that need. I see that happening a lot, even out in L.A. there are theater companies that will do Chekov, and you'll see all the [actors] from Bewitched. They just need their chops to be worked. I like film as much as theater, so I don't feel that either one is sacrificed by the other.

Lattanzi: I make my living in public television as an editor. So I think of the film and television business as the place to make your living, and the theater is frustrating because it's very hard to make a living. But on the other hand, you can get stuff done. So if you write a play and work at it for awhile, you get to the point where if you're reasonably good at what you're doing there's a reasonable chance that you can get it put on . . . So one of the things I love about the theater is the chance to actually do work.