by Nick Mamatas
There comes a time in every semi-successful novelist’s life, usually about twenty-five years in or so, or when they make one of two whimsical decisions:
I should write a picture book for tiny children!
or
I should write a play!
I chose “play.”
(Notably, both plays and picture books involve a lot less typing than a novel.)
To be clear, this is an impulse the semi-successful novelist experiences. Why hasn’t your favorite bestseller written a play? Because that author is your favorite bestseller.
Years ago, I started attending the plays put on by a local theater company that operates out of a black box theater in the basement of a pizzeria. You can even bring your slices down to eat during the show. The troupe is a small one, with actors often performing two or more roles, and its audio/visual set-up is inferior to that of my elementary school back in 1970s Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But the theater creates whole worlds within a little tetragon, just as in a story!
So, I took a workshop offered by another, larger local theater company, and commenced work on my play. I decided that my theme would be the writer H. P. Lovecraft, as I have a tiny and somewhat positive reputation in the “weird fiction” community…even if I am tempted to put quotes around community as I did around weird fiction.
The workshop differed from the prose workshops I was used to—e.g., work wasn’t read in advance. Instead, the students were assigned roles and read everything aloud, and then were expected to make comments on something they’d just heard for the first time, as performed by non-actors. Everyone found this quite difficult, though one thing became clear: when one character had a long monologue, the rest of us were sitting there doing nothing.
In the theater, you normally don’t want your characters sitting around, doing nothing. They are always there, in front of the audience, living and breathing.
In prose writing, an author can focus a reader’s attention on one character at a time, express interiority, undermine what is being said or described via unreliable narrators. In televisual or cinematic writing, the camera controls what the viewer experiences. A close-up on one character excludes others from the narrative moment, a montage generates novel information via the juxtaposition of images, and pacing is controlled via editing.
Theater works differently. Every character means some actor is going to have to be available and memorize lines. Every change of scene means new construction, or at least some choreography in which cast or crew shuffle chairs and boxes around. If a character is called upon to dance or sing, someone who can actually dance or sing has to do it, at least ideally. If a character changes outfit, there needs to be a second outfit ready to go, and space and time carved out for the actor to make the change. If there’s blood, there’s going to be laundry, or at least red handkerchiefs and a bit of sleight-of-hand. Even when theater is an extravagant Gesamtkunstwerk—“total art”—it has to be economical, parsimonious.
The Scylla and Charybdis of theatrical writing are being conversational and being cinematic. Conversational writing is obvious; two people (usually) talking about something happening off-stage, unseen and uncreated by the production. Unlike prose fiction, where dialogue is usually exemplary rather than exhaustive, a conversation on stage demands to be relatively complete.
Cinematic writing involves a lot of blackouts between scenes, eye-catching special effects, side characters that do nothing but serve coffee, lots of musical cues from popular hits from yesteryear that mean a lot to the writer but nothing to the audience, and big martial arts fights! This is the stuff of Hollywood, completed via dozens of takes and artfully edited before being screened. Doing it every night, all at once, perfectly, and twice on Wednesdays and Sundays is not only very expensive; it is nigh impossible.
I had to navigate between these two monsters to write my play, The Failure of the Century. I used a Dickensian scenario—Lovecraft receiving three late-night visitors as he struggles to type up his novella The Shadow Out of Time. But I couldn’t just have three “conversational” conversations; nor could I have “cinematic” oneiric journeys to his childhood, his married life in Brooklyn, and to the year 16,000 A.D. I would write theatrically.
With Lovecraft’s first visitor, Frank Belknap Long, they take turns with a typewriter, talk over one another, share a can of beans, and maybe even…kiss? Two characters, always doing something while communicating and miscommunicating. Same with second visitor Sonia Greene. There are divorce papers at play; a certain forbidden book, its pages still uncut and unread; and a letter-opener used maliciously. It’s a horror play—would there be blood? Yes, of course, but toward the end of each act, to make costume changes easier.
And the third visitor? Nyarlathotep! Why the crawling chaos as the spokesentity for the Old Ones? As one of Nyarlathotep’s lines explains: “I’m subtle. I fit in the room.” No special effects necessary. Just a bit of make-up and a headdress.
Plays are not finished when the script is complete. I had the great pleasure of a premiere, in London, for my very first play! I was told by theater people to start with “in London!” when describing the premiere of The Failure of the Century. It was a single staged reading at a pub theater, but still, London! And after seeing a video of the performance, I was able to make changes. Nyarlathotep spoke too long while Lovecraft sat around doing nothing—the very crime against theater I’d been warned against in the workshop. But I was able to rewrite.
I write these words after the U.S. premiere of the play, another staged reading, another small theater, this one in Boulder, Colorado. I was able to attend in person, with friends! It was exciting to see, to hear the chuckles and gasps from the audience. And then it was all over except for a royalty check substantial enough to cover a good meal.
Two staged readings in a year is great for a playwright. How thrilling to step away from worrying about pleasing an audience of thousands (…maybe) to an audience of dozens! The intimacy and immediacy of the play—every breath, every moment performed by another artist—is incredible to behold.
Theater is as immediate as it is ephemeral. Most plays are never published. I’ve spent years trying to find copies of unpublished plays by my old screenwriting professor Louis S. Peterson. He was the first Black author to have a straight play on Broadway (Take a Giant Step) and one of the first Black television writers in Hollywood. And yet, despite his prominence and success, only Take a Giant Step is available to read.
Thankfully, a semi-successful weird fiction writer doesn’t need to start from the ground floor. The chapbook is the natural habitat of weird fiction, from all the way back in the days of Lovecraft. Local publisher The Fabulist will be printing a small run of Failure. So who knows…maybe Nyarlathotep will be able to rise again, out of another black box.
