THEATER: Berkshire Playwrights Lab

On a cold, mid-February Sunday, three of the four principals from the fledgling Berkshire Playwrights Lab, Joe Cacaci, Jim Frangione, and Bob Jaffe, convene for an impromptu coffee in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, one of the few days they’re all able to get away given their busy lives as theater, television, and film professionals in New York and Los Angeles.

 

Only Matthew Penn, the fourth artistic director of Berkshire Playwrights Lab (BPL), is conspicuously missing. Penn, an actor and a recurring director for the hit TV show Law & Order, among others, is in L.A.—his pals inform—directing an episode of House. The threesome is quick to add, however, that this is how it works: this is one of the main reasons why four heads are better than one, two, or even three; there’s always backup, more than enough artistic directors to go around. If three’s a crowd, then four makes a company.

 

Since none of the artistic directors earns a salary at BPL, “we need to spell each other so we can do work that actually pays us,” laughs Jaffe, a tall, angular man, who brings to mind a young Richard Chamberlain. Jaffe, like the others, directs as well as acts, wearing whatever theatrical hat fits best at any given moment.

 

At this given moment, all three are wearing their BPL ones, more than happy to recount how this whole adventure got started and doing their best not to talk over one another, which is not so easy, given their collective, contagious, buoyant enthusiasm. It’s Frangione (who many might remember from Berkshire Theatre Festival’s well-regarded 2005 production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, in which he played Donny opposite Chris Noth’s Teach) who begins at, well, the beginning. His wife, Anne O’Dwyer, was a psychology professor for years at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, before she became an associate academic dean.

 

“Joe [Cacaci] and I,” Frangione explains, “are Emerson College grads from way back, and Joe ran a really terrific theater company called the Playwrights Kitchen Ensemble in Los Angeles, where they staged readings of different plays. I had this idea of starting some readings in the Berkshires, so I talked to Joe, who had just moved back East, and he came up here and we looked around.”

 

“And I knew Jim,” says Jaffe, “from working on this play [together], and Jim e-mailed me, and said he was working on this project, would I like to join them, and the first project we did was this staged reading [at Simon’s Rock]—well, more than a staged reading—of this play called The Guys, which was written after 9/11.” The reading was, in fact, a benefit for the Great Barrington Fire Department.

This—as they continue to recount in fits and stages, with each contributing portions of the story—all took place two summers ago, in 2007, and was the event that became the catalyst for more readings the following summer. Last spring, Penn, who has long had a family house in the Berkshires and was just coming off another season of Law & Order, quickly became drawn in as well.

 

The venture is certainly off to an auspicious start after its official inaugural season last summer of five staged readings plus a highly successful benefit, all held at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. (The threesome is quick to praise the Mahaiwe, which has been a very cooperative partner; Jaffe is the son of founding president and chair, Lola Jaffe.)

 

“We didn’t know what to expect,” says Cacaci, another actor/ playwright/ director, as well as teacher, of the inaugural event. “We were sitting around that day with all these great actors, and [a play written specifically for the event by] David Mamet, and we thought, ‘What if no one shows up?’”

 

Such worries, however, turned out to be unfounded. Some four hundred people attended the June 25 event, which presented seven short plays, including Mamet’s School, directed by Cacaci and performed by Frangione and Peter Riegert (of Local Hero and Animal House fame). The benefit, the only event for which BPL charged admission, was considered a huge success, providing energy and fundraising incentive and, maybe more importantly, good word of mouth. BPL was on its feet.

Not that there weren’t a few speed bumps down the road that soon followed. One piece, in particular, didn’t receive their full attention, they all agree. “There wasn’t enough time,” says Cacaci.

 

Instead of the usual three-day rehearsal period that BPL now gives all of its plays, they only had two days to get this “out there” farce up and running. “When it went up that night,” continues Cacaci, “it was a little like Springtime for Hitler, at least in our minds. I turned to my partner, Carol, and said, ‘Would it be inappropriate if I left?’ and she said, ‘Yes. Yes it would be.’”

 

The silver lining to the whole experience, however, was the lesson learned that BPL should never deviate from its formula: 1) Choose the best plays available, 2) Find the best actors willing and even eager to do this type of work, 3) Do the table reading (first read-through of the script with the entire cast gathered around a table) on Sunday night, as opposed to Monday morning, so as to let the play simmer overnight before starting rehearsals the next day, 4) Follow with never fewer than three full days of rehearsals, 5) Invite the public in for free on Wednesday night, and 6) Finish up with a moderated, well-prepared talkback with the audience and playwright.

 

It may sound simple, but even following such a strict protocol doesn’t guarantee success. “People don’t do new plays a lot because not many people know how to do it,” says Frangione. “They don’t know how to develop [new work], how to edit and work with a playwright, cutting it down to a place where we’re always moving the play forward, and then to get actors involved in that process; it’s difficult…. The director of the play generally advances the process, but we all watch a run-through, and we sit down with the director and actor and have notes and all weigh in.”

 

“But the comments we get,” says Jaffe, “would lead us to believe that the audience feels as if they’ve seen a play. They talk about the play as if they’ve had the full theater experience. A lot of people simply forget that the actors are walking around with scripts. Our objective is to realize the playwright’s intention. We want to present the play that the playwright wrote, so that for better or for worse, the playwright gets a sense of whether the words on paper can come to life. A three-day rehearsal period allows for that.”

 

“Most readings, you rehearse that afternoon and you put it up,” says Frangione. “And sometimes you get lucky….” But most of the time, Frangione suggests, you don’t, and the results can be, well, Springtime for Hitler. While the mission will remain the same, finding exciting new plays to present and develop through the initial rehearsal period and staged reading, BPL wants eventually to present some of these works as full-fledged productions.

 

“The next hurdle,” says Cacaci, “is to somehow raise enough money so that we’re in a position to produce these plays. But the mistake you make when you’re twenty is you bite off more than you can chew and it fizzles. We thought we’d start slowly. We don’t have to be there tomorrow.”

 

Part of that tomorrow, says Jaffe, is now having a better idea of what today consists of, what each reading costs, the work involved, the sort of administrative staff that may or may not be required. Despite local support, including discounted housing provided by the nearby Egremont Inn, each reading costs anywhere from six to eight thousand dollars to produce, depending on size of the cast. “Now,” Jaffe says, “we know that.”

 

Another piece of that tomorrow would ideally include a space of their own in which to continue this development work—a smaller venue for the reading of more intimate plays, but also a space that could house workshop productions that might consist of two- to three-week runs in front of fifty or so people. And perhaps such work would be year-round. Frangione envisions a future wherein they’re performing readings of new works at the Mahaiwe, further developing plays they may have read the previous year in a workshop, and eventually moving on to the third, more ambitious part of the plan: mounting full-fledged productions of original work they themselves have developed with the playwright and cast.

 

“We want to see plays break through to the light of day,” says Jaffe. “One play we read [last summer] now has a production schedule in the fall. We want to be in a position where we can bring it along.” And presumably then reap the financial and artistic benefits of doing so.

 

But however BPL continues to evolve, the mission will remain the same: to help playwrights develop their work. What BPL will always offer, along with an entertaining, engaging, and in this case free night of theater, is an invaluable experience for aspiring and even more-established playwrights. This is at the heart of what they do; their raison d’être. The core mission of BPL, the threesome insists, is to provide playwrights with useful and intelligent feedback on a work in progress. It’s not about the actors, it’s not about the audience, it’s about the play, helping the playwright improve the play. The play, they contend, really is the thing.

 

“I usually watch the playwright [during the readings],” says Cacaci, “and it’s fascinating because they’re listening to the response of the audience, which is a pretty good barometer, especially if it’s a comedy.”

 

“Playwrights love it,” says Frangione. “There aren’t too many places you can go to get this kind of developmental work. It’s very hard to find your way into this.”

 

Not that the experience is always painless. Cacaci, who presented one of his own plays last year, can attest to this firsthand.

 

“One of the one-acts was Joe’s,” says Jaffe. “And he knew exactly what he needed [after the reading].”

 

“Yeah, it needed a match,” quips Cacaci.

 

“Not true, not true,” says Jaffe.

 

“It went up and it didn’t work, on a lot of levels,” Cacaci admits. “The audience was very candid. It started out very nice, because it was me, but I said, ‘Let’s dispense with that.’ And then this guy got up and said, ‘It stinks. You’re proselytizing.’ And I was like, ‘Holy shit, what do I do now?’ But by the time I got back to New York, I had figured it out. I now knew what I needed to do. The process had worked.” (MAY 2009)

 

Managing editor Chris Newbound’s play, Morning, Noon, and Night, received a staged reading last summer at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.
 

THE GOODS

Berkshire Playwrights Lab
Great Barrington, Mass.

www.berkshireplaywrightslab.org

 

 

STAR-STUDDED GALA

On Friday, May 29, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Mass., will once again host the Berkshire Playwrights Lab Gala season opener. As with last year’s benefit, this year’s event will include the reading of original short plays—works by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, local playwright Joan Ackermann, actor/playwright Eric Bogosian, and Larry Gelbart. On the performing side of the equation, the all-star lineup will include Karen Allen, Tony Award-winning Elizabeth Franz, Dan Lauria, Wendie Malick, Peter Riegert, Jay Thomas and others.

 

Tickets range from $35 to $100, with higher-price tickets including a “backstage” post-performance invitation to a reception with playwrights and actors. (Tickets can be purchased either online at www.mahaiwe.org or by calling the Mahaiwe at .)

 

THE REST OF THE STORY: THE PLAY'S THE THING

Join us on Sunday, May 10, at 11 a.m. at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, Mass., for a conversation with co-artistic directors of the Berkshire Playwrights Lab. Matthew Penn, Jim Frangione, and Bob Jaffe will discuss the upcoming season and their long-term vision for the Berkshire’s newest theater company, along with writer Chris Newbound, as part of the award-winning Rest of the Story series of free public forums, moderated by Berkshire Living editor-in-chief Seth Rogovoy. For more information call us at .