What it's Like - The First Eight Aspects

Sanctuary's model for operating is that the playwright is the center of the company.  Not a guest, but the host. In the largest sense. Host and host body.

Although Sanctuary has done this service for several other playwrights now, none have written about what it's like. This seems to leave a big hole in the imagination. Something needs to fill it.

Writing about the experience documents critical parts of its dynamics; makes it more likely Sanctuary will reproduce these dynamics from playwright to playwright. These are the heart of what someone would call the Sanctuary experience. By nature it's an experience few will really have (and we're not sure if Sanctuary will last forever).

So since now the process has chosen me to be the playwright, I plan to document what it is like to be the playwright/producer on a Sanctuary show:

1. Thinking hard about the site and its properties. The shouting properties of the space; its posession and rights to its neighborhood; its sense of dominating energies, its radiances, its shortcomings.
2. Pondering how do you tell the story you want to tell beyond the page and how do you make the script fit the story you want to tell? The script becomes less your calling card and the dynamics of the event begin to supplant it. Then acting on what one infers. 
3. Hearing again all those voices arguing in one's head - characters, critics, supporters, the excited for yous, the tired of hearing its.
4. Having the joy of talking to so many smart directors and getting to choose the one that is organically "right" for the piece and its process. These guys are all uniformly amazing.
5. Knowing how much money there is to spend and figuring out which expenditures are more important. I know this sounds boring, doesn't it? But it's not. Money is the power to do what needs to be done - power is inherent. If we're talking about the power in theatre being given to the playwright, we have to mean - at least in part - that the money is under their control.
6. Realizing that in a sense everyone serves the script - the story, really. In that sense the playwright is yet another midwife.
   
7. Experiencing the exhiliration of juggling the text - largely an object to be heard - and its impacts in the other realms of sensation.
8. Sadly noting that this documentation - fascinating though it might be - must be created peripatetically, as finishing the script and making it acceptable as the controlling document for this event is far more important than documenting the process, however much an honor it is.