Fresh from the Oven of Playwriting Program: Five Bake-Off Plays

by Tracie Sweeney

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude." - Julia Child

With an attitude like that, the French Chef would be right at home in the Great American Play Bake-Off.

A bake-off is a teaching tool Professor Paula Vogel uses each fall with graduate students pursuing an MFA in playwriting in the University's Program in Literary Arts.

"Basically, we collect a group of writers and assign 'rules,'" Vogel (left) told a reporter earlier this year. "After the rules are designed, all writers must write the play within forty-eight hours. No exceptions. Sleep and meals and walking the dog come out of the allotted time. ... It doesn't matter about page length; it's not about completing the play. ... I do [bake-offs] because I think playwriting is a collective writing; I do them because we have to give ourselves permission to play."

"I've seen this process for twenty years," said Bonnie Metzgar, visiting assistant professor of literary art, and artistic director of the program's annual Festival of New Plays held in the spring. "It's the way Paula bonds with these students. Invariably, it makes them not be precious about their writing."

Dan LaFranc, a first-year graduate student in the program, echoes Metzgar. "A bake-off is about getting out of your own way," he said. "What is amazing is how much you can pull out of yourself" in those forty-eight hours.

"Train yourself to use your hands and fingers; they are wonderful instruments. Train yourself also to handle hot foods; this will save time. Keep your knives sharp. ... Above all, have a good time." - Julia Child in The Way to Cook

About six weeks before the start of the fall semester, this year's five bake-off participants received a packet that included two plays - The Trickster of Seville, written in 1630 by Tirso de Molina and the first play to introduce the legend of the great lover, Don Juan, to the literary world; and Don Juan Comes Back from the War, written in the early 1930s by German playwright Odon Von Horvath.

The packet also contained the bake-off's required ingredients. Using the readings as their jumping-off points, the playwrights had forty-eight hours to write something that included:

• a master and a servant;
• sword play;
• a statue;
• a ghost;
• coitus interruptus.

"It was wild," said LaFranc. "We had a major literary character we got to riff off of, which was terrifying, but very exciting. If we had been assigned a larger project - say, rewrite Don Juan - I would have freaked out."

Instead, he was inspired to write Catgut, a "Sin City/Frank Miller/dual superhero" story about a cat killer in the woods.

At the end of his forty-eight hours, first-year MFA student Cory Hinkle had written Mondo Don Juan, a forty-page comedy about a producer of B-movies. "I didn't realize that the original Don Juan was such an unrelentingly bad character," he said. "I loved the Von Horvath play, which was interested in Don Juan as a person."

Past bake-offs wrap up once the students report to campus and gather to read their works aloud in a marathon session. This year's bake-off, however, included a twist: Actors, directors, and dramaturges from the American Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre (ART/MXAT) Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge joined the five playwrights for an abbreviated but intense revision process that culminated in staged readings of the playwrights' works October 15 and 16 in McCormack Family Theater.

By including ART/MXAT in the bake-off, "we help writers learn to work as part of a team," Metzgar said. ART/MXAT students are steeped in theory and history, and work with ACT Artistic Director Robert Woodruff, whom Metzgar called the nation's "preeminent experimental interpreter" of classical theater. The actors, directors, and dramaturges were able to share an array of expertise with the playwrights. "It's no mistake that Paula chose the Don Juan legend for the bake-off students to reinterpret," Metzgar said.

In return, the ART/MXAT students had an opportunity to work with young playwrights. Classically trained actors starting out in the business "more often than not are reading for roles in new plays," said Rebecca Wolff, production coordinator in the Literary Arts Program. Introducing young actors to young writers "will make theater more alive."

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music." - Julia Child

Or writing plays. Competition for a place in the playwriting program is intensely competitive, said Metzgar; three students are admitted each year. The program "looks for special writers," she said. "Brown playwrights are notable for being poetical people. They're artists, but also poets."

Poets who, it could be said, make writing plays look like a piece of cake.