Munday: We’re given access to the narrator Billy’s rambling inner monologue, which is by turns funny and poignant. There’s no one the fiction writer can hide behind. If the story fails or succeeds, it does so solely on the author’s terms. Here the fiction author reigns supreme over everything: sound, sets, lighting, costumes. On the other hand, fiction writing, mercifully, supersedes all of these contingent factors inherent in theater. When I was an actor, I would sometimes get a laugh on a line one night and the next night there would be radio silence. Things can also change from performance to performance and no one is ever sure why. But generally the theatrical endeavor is always a leap of faith, and there’s always a danger that the actors will not perform the play as originally intended, or that the director’s vision will not coincide with the playwright’s, or that the audience, for whatever reason, will not be able to meet the artists halfway. On a side note, some of the best performances I’ve seen have been in stripped-down spaces, where it was just the actors onstage saying lines, sometimes even reading straight off the script-so it doesn’t take much to bring a script alive. And never are there more “blanks” than in the world of low-budget theater, where there’s no sound, no set, no lighting, and you’re lucky if the actors have something in their closet at home that might approximate the necessary costume. Moreover, playwrights are dependent on others to bring their artistic vision to life, which includes the audience’s imaginative ability to fill in blanks where blanks exist. This, of course, is the behind-the-scenes of the process, the part that the reader-or audience member-isn’t privy to, but which I think must inform the finished product. Yes, the playwright in this story stares at a blank computer screen late into the night, for weeks on end-just like every writer in the world-but eventually he gets to be in a rehearsal room with 20 actors and a director, socializing over muffins. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: Let’s start with the fact that playwriting is ultimately a collaborative process, while fiction writing, sadly, is almost entirely solitary. What about the relationship between playwriting and fiction writing do you find most interesting? ![]() You’ve written other fiction concerned with theater, and you’re a playwright yourself. ![]() Oliver Munday: In your story “ A Substitution,” a playwright struggles to figure out his next project. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Sayrafiezadeh and Oliver Munday, the design director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. “ A Substitution” is a new story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |