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NOT DOING THE HOMEWORK

My wife Maria-Beatriz and I see a lot of theatre at all levels, from rough-draft readings to the finished-off product. I also participate in two writing groups, and I always solicit scripts from people to read if I cannot be at a performance or a reading so that I can drop in a couple of pennies' worth of response.

Now, I don't know if what I want to talk about is a "trend" (I doubt it - "slipshodishness" is probably as timeless as bad taste), but I notice quite often that writers do not do their "homework" to anchor the script in the reality they are trying to present. And this really irritates me because it violates something that I learn more and more strongly each day I write my theatre: except for perhaps dance, theatre is the art form most dependent upon "embodiment," that is, making the word flesh, turning flesh into words, and setting this all in a concrete and considered multi-dimensional universe sluicing through real time.

An example. A fellow writer and I recently had scripts done in a local festival of short works. Her piece had three characters: a child (11 years of age or so, played by an adult), a child psychologist, and a police detective. The story involved the use of the child as bait by a woman (spoken about by not presented on the stage) to lure men to robbery and their deaths. The detective wanted to just whack a confession out of the child, but the psychologist felt it important to heal the wounds caused by the violence.

The play stretched credulity in a number of directions, but what aggravated me most of all was the complete lack of attention to the details of interviewing a child in such a situation. Maria-Beatriz, who is a social worker in a prominent children's hospital in Boston, squirmed in her seat as she saw every rule and practice violated for the sake of dramatic effect. And, in the end, what dramatic effect the play had was undermined by the inattention to detail because the effect was earned under a false flag.

This is primarily a lack of attention to "process," to understanding the syntax of how certain parts of the world process the world. Another kind of "process" homework that often does not get done involves simple physics. One play read in our workshop involved a man, gut-shot, dying in the bathtub where he fell after being shot by a woman handcuffed to the pipes of a sink. (They are in a cabin where he has taken her as a hostage after a botched robbery - she somehow managed to get the gun while he

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