ACT ONE. SCENE ONE..
Playwright sits at a
kitchen table in pink
T-shirt and jeans, rewriting the second act
of a play that will be produced in two weeks
at a major Washington theater. Playwright is in her early 40s, attractive and accomplished.
Variety calls her a “writer of comedic skill.” A clear vase sits on the table,
filled with plump, pink roses the playwright has bought herself. She opens her laptop.
Playwright Karen Zacarías is wrestling with her play’s final scene. The ending needs one more “aha moment,” she says. The main character must break down and come to the realization that she has ruined things for the other characters. Right now, Zacarías is not sure her character has realized that.
This is a moment that requires high-wire crafting. That’s why people who write plays are called playwrights. A play is wrought.
Unlike other forms of literature, plays need a stage to make their words live. Audiences can be unforgiving. Success or failure is very public. For the playwright, this means failure can feel exponentially more devastating, and success beyond magnificent.
Zacarías, 42, who was born in Mexico to a family of poets, is rewriting her comedy “The Book Club Play.” Later, she will deliver these new lines to the actors who will perform the play through Nov. 6 at Arena Stage, under the direction of Molly Smith. The posters are already hung in the windows of the striking new Southwest D.C. theater complex, and the pressure is on: “The Book Club Play” will be the first work produced under Arena’s American Voices New Play Institute, launched in July 2009 with a $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The institute, which Smith, Arena’s artistic director, says provides tools for writers to do their best work, operates as a “think tank” for the development of new American plays.
It includes fellowships to train young producers, and a course called Theater 101 gives audience members an intimate look at play production. But its playwright-in-residence program is generating the most buzz. Five emerging and established playwrights — Lisa Kron, Katori Hall, Charles Randolph-Wright, Amy Freed and Zacarías — have been selected to receive, for three years, a $40,000 annual salary, health benefits and production seed money that they control to revisit older works or write new ones.
Arena promises to produce at least one play by each of the playwrights, who are invited to live and work in a Southwest townhouse that Arena has rented three blocks from the theater. The house has become a setting to create, hang out and talk about drama.
When Freed got the news that she had been selected for the paid residency, “I was kind of in a state of shock. The reality is playwrights make no money. I said, ‘Do you realize what that means for a writer, that you are given space and time to do work without 80 percent of the energy going to “How am I going to get the bills paid”?’ ”
After the call, “my husband and I looked at each other, and we both knew my life had changed,” says Freed, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose play, “You, Nero,” is set to open at Arena on Nov. 25.
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