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On Playwriting, Lying, and Learning the Difference:a speech to the winners of Write A Play! NYC 2005by Madeleine George (The following address was delivered at the Write A Play! NYC Awards Ceremony at the Donnell Public Library on June 7, 2005.) So I’m going to tell you kind of an embarrassing story about myself today, and it might not seem at first as if it’s about playwriting, but it really is about playwriting, you’ll see in the end. When I was in elementary school, I was a really big liar. I wasn’t, like, malicious about it or anything, I didn’t make up nasty rumors about people, I just felt like things that were true were not usually as interesting as things I could make up, and I preferred to talk about interesting things. I liked to talk, and I really liked to make people listen - I loved when people’s eyes lit up as I told them a story, and I loved watching the expression on their face as it turned from laughing to amazed to frightened to sad. I lived a kid’s life in a small New England town – stuff almost never happened to me in real life that was intense enough to make people look sad or amazed when I told them about it. So I started just, like, embellishing the true stories I saw happening around me in my life, just to try to get a little stronger reaction out of people when I recounted them. This is when I was in about the third grade. I started to experiment with the edges of the truth, to see if I could just like spangle them a little bit, not change the shape of the truth, exactly, just jazz it up, make it sparkle a little more. And it totally worked. I remember sitting at the dining room table at my best friend Katharine’s house, telling her parents the story of how my dad was trying to get rid of the groundhog that was living under our backyard and destroying our vegetable garden. The groundhog had lived under our yard for as long as I could remember. Our family referred to him as “the varmint,” and every summer my mild-mannered father would try to dream up a new and more annihilating way to exterminate him once and for all. (Every summer the varmint survived.) That summer my father had started shoveling dirt into the varmint’s holes and then pouring cement over them to seal them up. So I was telling Katharine’s parents about the cement and I remember Katharine’s father looking at me with these sparkling, story-hungry eyes, loving my story, practically begging me to make it better than it already was. “So then,” I said, “when the cement didn’t work, my dad drove the car down to the bottom of the garden, and he backed it up next to the varmint’s hole, and he stuck this like vacuum cleaner tube onto the exhaust pipe, and he pumped the hole full of poisonous exhaust!” To be fair, this was something my father was always threatening to do--he thought it would be cheaper and more effective than dynamite, the other option he was seriously considering. But he had never actually done this thing with the exhaust, because my mother wouldn’t let him back the car up over her flowers. But it was just such a great story, and as I told it I could see in my mind’s eye, as clear as a memory, the determined look on my dad’s face, the clench of his jaw as he put his arm up on the back of the vinyl bench seat and turned to look over his shoulder as he eased the Chrysler Plymouth down the lawn to where the varmint lived. I could see the ruts the tires left in the soft, wet dirt. I could hear the dull thwack of the car door as my dad slammed it shut and strode around to the back to attach the vacuum tube to the exhaust pipe with silver duct tape. And as I described these things, I saw Katharine’s mother and father’s eyes light up with the images I was seeing in my head. They laughed and laughed and I added more details and more details, and I totally forgot that the thing I was telling them in the past tense, as if it had just happened a day or two before, had never actually taken place. The more I practiced spangling the truth like this the better I got at it, and the more attention it seemed to get me. I told all the kids at school that because my dad was a scientist (true) he had taught me all kinds of secret science facts (untrue, unless you count facts about the discovery of penicillin, which are hardly secret) and that therefore I was in a position to identify which rocks on the playground were meteorites and which were plain old rocks; this was useful to them, I told the kids, because meteorites were valuable--if they found one, they could sell it and make anywhere from ten to a hundred dollars, depending on how old the meteorite was. This was hugely not true, of course, but we played “Meteorites” every day at recess for weeks after I told people this, kids running around the playground picking up hunks of asphalt and fistfuls of crappy gravel and lining up in front of me where I stood by the pine tree, gesturing like a queen at the stones in their hands: “Meteorite.” “Not a meteorite.” “Oh, totally meteorite!” Eventually my truth-spangling turned into full-scale lying. What can I say, it was intoxicating getting people to listen to me, having people think that the things I had to say were incredibly fascinating. By fifth grade it was starting to interfere with my schoolwork and I got sent to see the school counselor, Mr. Clarkson, who looked at me with such deep concern in his eyes that I poured out a whole made-up sob story to him about how my parents didn’t love me and how they locked me in the closet to punish me and gave my little sister everything her heart desired while I never got anything I wanted (okay, that last part was true--they still totally favor her, it’s so unfair). When my parents got called in to school to explain the whole locking me in the closet thing my truth-spangling habit finally caught up with me. I got into major trouble for lying to the school counselor about my parents, and rightly so – I was lucky I had only said they locked me in a closet. If I had made up a worse story, I could have been removed from my family, my parents could have gotten into trouble with the law. It terrified me how powerful, how public, my lies had suddenly become. But the same year I got into such deep hot water for lying to Mr. Clarkson, my mother, who had every right to be permanently furious with me, did a very wonderful, very generous thing. She signed me up for a creative writing workshop that met in a nice lady’s living room every Thursday after school. I started going then, in fifth grade, and I kept going every Thursday afternoon until I graduated from high school. I wrote the beginnings of stories, the beginnings of poems, hundreds and hundreds of beginnings of plays. I practiced and practiced this new, harmless form of lying, the grown-up version of “Meteorites.” And pretty soon it stopped being so hard to stick to the truth in real life, because I had a place to go to tell my embellished stories, a place where, instead of getting in trouble for making things up, people loved me for it. In fact, they gave me awards – not unlike the ones you guys are getting today. All writing is lying – even autobiography, which lies by playing up some facts and leaving out others – but playwriting is the lyingest writing of all, because everybody who works on a play is a big fat liar. The actors come on stage and say, “I’m not a seventh-grader with a retainer and math homework, I’m Danny Zucco, I’m the Velveteen Rabbit, I’m Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark.” The set designer says, “This isn’t a wooden frame with a piece of painted canvas stretched over it, this is a forest, this is a skyscraper, this is the Castle Elsinore.” And the playwright says to the audience, “You aren’t really sitting in a cafeteria, in an auditorium, in the Walter Kerr Theater, you’re in another world, you’re living a different life, this is all really happening right in front of you and you’re part of it, you’re actually there.” So I just want to say to the new Young Playwrights who are here today, if any of you guys have had perhaps some small issues with the truth, or if, as I’m sure you are, you’re good, honest kids who would never turn your parents in to social services just to see an interesting look cross your guidance counselor’s face, but who still know what that feels like, that little sparkly tug at your heart that makes you want to add another, better detail, make another person’s eyes light up as you tell them a story, then I just want to say I think you’re doing great, you’re totally on the right track, and I want to welcome you to the big lying world of the theater. Madeleine George is a alumna of the 1993 and 1994 Young Playwrights Festivals. The recipient of numerous awards including the Princess Grace Fellowship, Ms. George is still writing plays and is a part of a playwriting collective called 13P. She is also a teacher and a member of the Young Playwrights Festival Selection Committee. |
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