I did want to point folks to my fancy new website, courtesy of New Dramatists (the happiest place on Earth): http://newdramatists.org/kristoffer-diaz

All my most recent bio and show info goes there. Contact info too.
And I’m on Twitter: @kristofferdiaz

Thanks, all two of you reading.

All of which means you don’t really want to blog, or more accurately, you’d love to blog, but you’re not at liberty to discuss the things you’d most like to discuss, and therefore have little interest discussing the things you’re allowed to discuss.

I’ll try to get back to this soon. Hopefully with news to report.

1. Rosie Perez asking me (read: telling me) to drink the “Green Juice.”  I still don’t know what was in the” Green Juice.”  I drank it though, because Rosie is, as her bio for the event said, a “Puerto Rican Icon.”  (That was actually her entire bio. I want to be like Rosie when I grow up.)

2. Selecting our casts: I was particularly bummed that Sarah Silverman, Sam Rockwell, and Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar from The Wire) weren’t going to be part of my team — I had big plans for those folks. But I ended up blessed with kind of the ideal group of folks for a show like this: Elizabeth Banks, Leslie Bibb, America Ferrara, Cheyenne Jackson, and the aforementioned Puerto Rican Icon.

3. Leslie Bibb continuing to struggle on the line: “I mean, maybe. We don’t even know who you are.”  You know that look when an actor knows she knows the line but can’t keep herself from stumbling on it?  She had it.  All day.  She kept looking over at me to make sure she got it right — and she got it right more often than she thought she did.  At one point, she even kind of apologized for stumbling on it — and in my mind, I was thinking “after your performance in this scene — you can do no wrong in my eyes.”

4. Leslie Bibb telling me I “looked so handsome” in my suit.  That was nice too.

5. Finding ourselves on the dance floor, and the DJ playing this song, and then realizing that, oh by the way, Gloria effing Estefan was dancing right next to us, and not only that, so was Emilio Estefan, and not only that, they were now leading us in kind of a version of the Electric Slide.

6.  Getting special permission from Gloria effing Estefan herself, in person, to use that same song in our play — so Cheyenne Jackson could dress as a woman and perform the dance Tracy Morgan did to get on 30 Rock.  (It was a weird play.)

7.  Hearing America Ferrera rap the word “sausages” with great power and dedication while Leslie Bibb beatboxed. (It was a weird play.)

8. Realizing that I kind of wrote a song with M. Ward. Not really, but kind of.

9. Coming to the conclusion that Rachel Dratch might be the funniest human being on the planet, especially onstage.

10. Finding out that our play was going last in a bill that included Rajiv Joseph (who had Jennifer Aniston jumping in for a last minute cameo), Theresa Rebeck, and Lynn Nottage (who wrote a beautiful short play for muMs and Sarah Silverman — I’d love to see a full-length version).  Humbling.  Beyond belief.

This all was kind of fun, I’d say.

“Talk amongst yourselves!”

That old “Saturday Night Live” catch phrase has been popping into my mind a lot lately at the theater, complete with the shrill Long Island accent of Mike Myers’s Linda Richman.

The reason? At far too many new plays in recent seasons the characters seem to spend more time chatting to the audience than they do talking to each other. Instead of interacting with their fellow characters, they keep turning away from the action to give us commentary on what just happened, or explain what we’ve missed.

They spout lyrical tangents describing their impressions or zoom into dazzling riffs that reveal the playwright’s comic gifts. They seem to be doing anything, in short, but talking to each other, which is to say exchanging dialogue, once the standard format of modern drama.

Direct address, as it is called in the trade, has become the kudzu of new playwriting, running wild across the contemporary landscape and threatening to strangle any and all other dramaturgical devices. Hence my furtive impulse to stand up and hurl Linda Richman’s memorable exhortation at the stage.

Examples are almost too numerous to bother citing. A particular offender from last season was the Kristoffer Diaz play “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” about the colorful world of professional wrestling. I’d estimate that at least three-quarters of the play consisted of, um, elaborate monologues from one or another character describing events the playwright was unable to dramatize or chose not to. This secondhand description was particularly frustrating in a play about a sport that thrives on the display of combat. Conflict, that key ingredient in drama, is hard to come by when the characters in a play refuse to engage with one another.

Both the charming Kim Rosenstock play “Tigers Be Still” and the somewhat more cloying Julia Cho comedy “The Language Archive” relied heavily on narration. “The Brother/Sister Plays” by Tarell Alvin McCraney threw in spoken stage directions for good measure. It’s come to the point that I’m almost disarmed if I make it through a whole play in which the “fourth wall” isn’t regularly if not relentlessly breached.

What, nobody wants to talk to me? Hey, what am I doing here?

Direct address does, of course, have an important place in the theater. It certainly has distinguished roots. Greek theater began, after all, with just a single actor and the chorus onstage – not much possibility for elaborate interaction among characters there. (But then that’s why Aeschylus got the ball rolling and added a second actor, and Sophocles went him one better and brought in a third.) Shakespeare’s plays are famous for their soliloquies and asides, as well as their prologues and epilogues in which the characters (or players) directly acknowledge the presence of the audience.

The ability to allow a character to express his or her thoughts in a manner that, strictly speaking, people do not normally do in real life will always be a necessary playwriting tool, and an illuminating one. It is impossible to imagine “Our Town” without the stage manager, or “The Glass Menagerie”without the tortured narration of Tom.

But the device can also be used simply to cover up a multitude of playwriting sins. If you can’t figure out how to naturally impart important information, well, just have somebody step forward and fill us in. Want to define character without bothering to have to do it through action and dialogue? Just have Joe or Mary pour out their feelings to us in a long monologue. The art of deploying exposition is a challenging one, but it is a measure of a playwright’s skill. So, too, is the art of establishing character in naturalistic ways. There’s a reason why writing teachers always implore students to show us rather than tell us things: showing is naturally more dynamic, both in prose and in drama.

And when characters step forward to talk to us in the middle of a play, they call attention to the artifice of the enterprise, reminding us that we’re at the theater watching a writer’s commentary on human experience, not the thing itself.

True, the power of much great modern theater – some of Edward Albee’s finest work, much of Caryl Churchill, almost all of Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht – derives directly from its abandonment of the trappings of naturalism, its insistence on confronting the audience with freedom from old-fashioned form. Then again Chekhov, arguably (inarguably?) the greatest modern playwright, achieved his mastery in plays that are almost ruthlessly true to observed life (a few musing monologues notwithstanding). He broke new ground in many formal ways, but the beauty of his plays is directly connected to the unprecedented manner in which he captured the precise, moment by moment truth of his characters’ experience onstage.

I sometimes think the decline of naturalism as the standard format for contemporary drama has simply made it easier for writers to get sloppy in ways that were more or less forbidden to contemporaries of Ibsen and Shaw and Wilde. Young playwrights these days employ direct address indiscriminately, breaking the spell of essentially naturalistic works because they have failed to grapple with some problem of structure. One reason the work of Annie Baker (“The Aliens,” “Circle Mirror Transformation”) stands out is her very sparing use of direct address.

The idea that you have to know the rules – even master them – before you break them seems to have lost some of its currency, because in our post-Beckett theatrical landscape there really are no rules.

Do any other theatergoers share my exasperation with this tendency of stage characters to chat us up indiscriminately, often endlessly? Feel free to directly address this question. Or talk amongst yourselves.

As you can probably imagine, I’ve got a lot to say about this.  Most of it, believe it or not, is not about his interpretation of my play (although I wholeheartedly believe he has missed the mark, and will be more than happy to discuss why and where, if needed), but rather about some of his fundamental assumptions about theater.  As mentioned above, I’ll be addressing some of this in more detail in the coming days.  For now, I’d just like folks to read his essay, form their own opinions on it, and consider a couple of arguments on behalf of us young playwrights who haven’t “mastered the rules” of drama before breaking them:

1. The “fourth wall” itself is a construct (18th century European, I think — am I right?); a writer makes a decision to honor it or not.  I’d argue that either choice — acknowledging that the audience is there in the room or pretending that they are not — is a fundamentally valid one.

2.  And since I mentioned it: we’re talking about a European construct here.  I (and many playwrights of my generation) have been directly influenced by African-American theatrical traditions, Asian theatrical traditions, Latino/Chicano theatrical traditions (I am Puerto Rican, after all), hip-hop theatrical traditions, feminist theatrical traditions…many of which reject the very concept of the fourth wall.  Mr. Isherwood (in an earlier article about Fela!)  maintains that one of the essential reasons we need a fourth wall is “to allow the audience to have some intellectual perspective on the material.”  I argue that (a) we’re not always looking for intellectual perspective (emotional, visceral connection is one of my touchstones), and (b) an audience doesn’t necessarily need an imaginary disconnect from the performers to think critically about a work.

3. We live in an age where media is becoming more and more of a two-way conversation every single day.  Cable news programs run constant polls and report on the tweeted thoughts of everyday Americans.   Presidential debates are “scored” live by citizens with nifty feedback dials.  Newspaper reporters can now write blog posts and receive instant feedback in form of comments. Everywhere you turn, people want to share opinions and be part of the story.  And we’ve got the artform that’s absolutely best suited to fulfill that need.  Why shouldn’t we cultivate that personal connection?  What do we gain by ignoring it?

4.  If the goal is to present a realistic vision of actual human existence, I’d argue that theater loses that battle to television and film more often than not.  What theater has that no other art form has is simple to define: the audience.  The human element.  The thrill of the live event.  I argue that the move towards establishing a tangible connection with the audience in attendance is not just a valid form of theatrical expression, but an essential one.  To acknowledge our audience is to play to our strength.

5. I argue that conflict (certainly the fundamental building block of theater — I learned that much of the rules before I got started) onstage does not only take the form of people sitting in the same room and arguing.  A character’s monologue, if well-written, should be brimming with conflict — not only in the actual words spoken, but in the context of the story, in the battle between one’s public and private selves, in the challenges laid out and taken on throughout the speech.  Monologues are not inherently inert.  The monologues in Chad Deity (a singular monologue actually, with a tiny coda at the end — I’m more than happy to discuss structure in great detail with any interested party) are all intentionally active, all in the service of a protagonist attempting to accomplish a goal that means more to him than anything else in the world.  No one talks in my plays just to talk.

6. And finally, a nerdy point about wrestling (because while I’d never deign to call myself an expert on the theater, I’m happy to trumpet my excessive knowledge of the squared circle): “combat” is certainly a key feature of televised professional wrestling.  However, watch a single episode of the WWE’s Monday Night Raw and you’ll discover that far more time is spent talking about fighting than actually fighting.  It’s akin to soap operas and sex in that regard.  The conflict exists — the conflict always exists — but it’s not always illustrated in the form of (choreographed) combat.

And there’s no fourth wall in wrestling.

So maybe we can start the conversation here.

The short answer, sadly, is: you can’t.  We haven’t yet signed a publication deal.  I expect an arrangement to be made sometime in 2011.  We’re still hammering out some details for the potential future life of the play (don’t worry — you will definitely have the opportunity to see it again sometime soon, somewhere in the country), and once those plans are in place, we can move on to publishing.  I’ll let you know ASAP.

Until then, your best bet is to contact my agent Derek Zasky at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (dzasky@wmeentertainment.com; 212.903.1396).  We’re making the script available primarily for educational purposes (colleges and/or folks who want to write about it) and to theaters interested in potentially producing it when the rights become available, but other arrangements might be able to be made.

So there’s that.

San Diego comes HARD.

More of his work (as well as a SPOILERIFFIC image!) can be found here.

what was the last play that both (a) had some measure of success getting produced and (b) represented something new in the theater?

Twitter being Twitter, of course, the conversation was limited to 140 character bursts.  Even still, the question got further clarified and some answers were given (you can find most of it in my timeline), leading me to this conclusion:

so what we’re saying is: there hasn’t been a massively *important *and *successful *play* since ANGELS IN AMERICA?

Now of course, this is about an hour conversation between maybe ten folks on Twitter.  Hardly comprehensive.  But it seems a little surprising to me, and certainly worth investigating.  So I bring it here, where we can discuss it in a bit more detail.

Towards that goal, I’ll try to define my criteria a bit better.  I used the terms “important” and “successful” about, but I’ll modify them slightly.  I think I’m asking about “importance” as the overall descriptor here.  If a play is “new” (as defined below) and “successful” (also defined below), I’d argue that it becomes more and more important.  Of course you can quibble with that, but we’ve got to frame the question somehow, right?  So let’s agree on that.

On the topic of “new,” I’d factor in one or more of these:

*some kind of new/novel form — and it doesn’t have to be on the level of Brecht or Beckett; I’d consider plays like M. Butterfly, Fences, and Zoot Suit to be trying something different.  Basically, something outside of the straightforward realism that seems to dominate our stage (bonus points if we can see other plays that have followed in that plays footsteps);

*some kind of social interest/awareness/relevance – I wouldn’t say that something like Ruined is groundbreaking in form, but to have that subject matter in front of major theater audiences nationwide means a whole lot. Similarly, a musical like In The Heights, which doesn’t push a social message, can still have important resonance based on the musical forms it brings to a wider audience.

And that “wider audience” remark leads to the “successful” part of the equation:

*critical success/awards: if a play wins the Pulitzer, it enters sort of rarefied air.   A play doesn’t have to have been given a ton of awards to be “important,” but it’s hard to argue that awards don’t push plays deeper into the conversation.

*an audience: for a lot of plays, this is the real test. Do people come to see the play?  Does it have long runs?  Again, you don’t have to run forever to be important, but if people don’t see the play, what kind of importance can you really have?

*educational impact: if you were going to be teaching a history of theater survey course, would this play make it onto your curriculum?  And what would you say about it?

I’m not necessarily looking for plays that hit on of all of these fronts (although Angels in America and Rent (the two shows of my theatrical life that really seem to fit the bill) certainly came close.  But plays that are truly important — well, I imagine they’d need pretty good marks across the board.

So here’s my slightly modified question: using the criteria above, what are The Most Important Plays Since Angels in America?

Answer in the comments.

UPDATE: Naming plays is helpful. What would be more helpful is talking about why you think those plays fit the bill.

UPDATE: Let’s add one more factor into the conversation: impact outside of the world of theater.  This can include bringing new audiences into the theater, spawning a movie or television show that reaches a wider audience, changing the way people think about a topic or person — any of that.  And yes, I realize that (a) this eliminates a lot of plays and (b) isn’t the goal of many plays.  But still.  If we’re talking about importance, you should get points for breaking through into the real world.

And that, of course, leads me to one of my favorite questions: what about Tyler Perry?

True diversity is when a person’s differences are welcomed, desired, and integral to the environment such that their absence would diminish the product. Exhibit A: New York. So many different races and cultures in one place create a singular energy and flavor. That’s its beauty. We may get on each other’s nerves, but we all have to be here to make it magical. We have made progress, it’s inevitable when we are living the “browning of America.” But sometimes it’s not where you are but where you are not that speaks volumes. It’s a black thing, but I think you can understand.

Okay.  From the beginning.

So we all embarked on careers in the theater because at some point in our lives, we did theater for free, and we banded together with our classmates or colleagues, and we worked long, hard hours, and we fought and challenged ourselves, and it was hard and it sucked, and then we actually did the thing, and it was awesome, and we cried tears of great happiness, and we partied and cheered each other and it was ultimately one of the most beautiful things we had ever done in our lives until that point, and we eventually found out that there were people who got paid to live that life, and we made up our minds to go live that life, no matter how hard the process of getting to that point of getting paid might be.

Right?

So then we get the jobs, and we go to the office each day, or we go to rehearsal room every day, and we get together with a bunch of other nerdy theater geeks, and we’ve found our place.  We’ve gotten to the place where we don’t have to take math and science and English and PE and whatever — we just get to be in the damn afterschool drama class all day long.  And yes, our jobs involve marketing and math and money and all that grown-up blahblahblah that makes everyone else who has a job anywhere in the world drag their feet and wish they were someplace else from 9-5 (or in our case, 10-6 at the earliest)  everyday, but still.  We’re working in the theater.

And still, it’s not a very joyful place.

And for a lot of us — especially those of us who maybe grew up in cultures that celebrated the drum, or honored joy by sharing huge communal meals with the people around us, or that can’t do housework with music in our ears, or believe in bringing babies everywhere we go so they can both bring joy and be raised by that proverbial village that other people think they invented — for those of us who grew up with those values, the unjoyful workplace is a bitch of a place to find ourselves.

And then I look at places like Google, where lunch is taken care of, and employees are encouraged to come up with and pursue dream projects, and it’s all vaguely communal, and there are those swimming pools where you stay in one place and the water moves around you, and there’s all this awesome stuff and ideas and energy, and I wonder — why don’t theaters look like that?

I don’t have more specific ideas than this right now.  I’m kind of vomiting this all out.  But I guess what I’m getting at is this: those of us who work in the theater are kind of in the top percentile of luckiest people in the world.  We get paid to do what we love.  Or to support what we love, at the very least.  And a lot of the time, our workplace doesn’t seem all that happy.  (And yes, that’s probably indicative of the United States itself, but that’s for another time and place.)

And I guess what I’m saying is if I ever run a theater (and if I was betting, I’d bet that I’m gonna do that someday), it’s going to be a place where my employees love to be.