(Read at the Jewel Box Theatre's awards ceremony, June 2000)
In 1994 Mark (who was not yet my husband) and I found ourselves employed at the legal publishing subsidiary of a major publishing company. We were denizens of what today's corporate slang calls a "cube farm," toiling amid a vast honeycomb of grey cubicles lit by banks of strangely harsh and anxiety-producing fluorescent lights. The building itself, a monument to thoughtless development, sat alone on an arid plain many miles north of Colorado Springs.
I was a refugee from the legal profession, having decided after earning a law degree in 1979 that I did not want to practice law. So I earned my living writing articles for lawyers to tell them how to practice law - a classic example of the maxim, "those who can't do, teach!" Mark was doing penance for a rudderless youth as an itinerant jazz pianist, having awakened one morning to find that the stream of life had deposited him on these unpromising shores - editing the bone-dry data churned out by me and the other lapsed lawyers who had taken refuge there.
Yet, in this soul-killing existence a ray of moonlight shone: Mark had a night job as the town paper's classical music critic. A few months after starting this job, Mark's boss decided he hated reviewing theater - which mostly involved giving up evenings and backsides to hard chairs in church basements and the like viewing the tedious efforts of earnest, but amateur, community actors as they pushed creaky theatrical vehicles (the only ones for which they could afford the royalty payments) uphill - so Mark inherited this job as well. Night after night we watched these spectacles. By day, on long lunchtime walks out on the barren plains surrounding our place of employment, we discussed what we had seen: what worked in the plot and performance and what did not. Then one night one of the producers of plays for a small dinner theater lamented to us the scarcity of material for her kind of theater. She said there just weren't many good light comedies calling for a single set and no more than eight actors that were newer than the 1970s. Of the plays that a small community group like hers could afford to produce, these were the ones her audiences seemed to enjoy most. This planted the seed: Could we write such a play? We felt that we could.
We set out some general goals, based on our experience as theater viewers. These were the traits that, to us, a successful comedy - and particularly a farce - must have: Interesting and ultimately likable characters who get themselves into a jam doing something they should not be doing, who have to juggle more and more deceptions in order to keep their whole naughty house of cards from collapsing. We wanted a plot that tied up all the loose strands - preferably with a little twist at the end. We also decided to minimize profanity: We had seen too many of what we called "screaming f-word" plays, in which obscenities serve as a cheap - and not often successful - way of heightening humor or dramatic tension.
Searching for a premise, I remembered a story my sister told about a friend of hers who was a percussionist in a symphony orchestra. Desperately in need of a favor from the orchestra's conductor, he and his wife decided to invite the fellow for dinner to feel him out. It turned out the conductor was the one who did the feeling - of the percussionist's wife! He was a pompous, demanding and uncooperative Don Juan who French-kissed the hostess upon leaving. This was our beginning: The percussionist became a mild-mannered violist - violists are funnier than percussionists - in a sinking B-rate orchestra; the conductor became a famous but fading Russian pianist. From here we just began to spin a tale. The couple pretends to live in the wife's boss's house while the boss is mysteriously out of town. The boss dotes on his huge, irascible cat. Unbeknownst to the couple, the boss's parents and his gay lover - as well as the famous pianist - are separately on their way over. We tried to make everything go wrong that could possibly do so.
Over the next four years, Mark and I honed the plot and dialogue. Often this took place on our lunchtime walks. In 1995, we married. In 1996, we were laid off from our jobs - and that was a real stroke of luck. Mark's work at the paper kept expanding - now he was reviewing fine art as well as theater and classical music. I began doing freelance editing at home. We often worked on the play seated at Mark's computer as we sipped our morning coffee, or on an afternoon tea break. Several trial readings with friends revealed to us that the work was way too long! The first draft lasted two and-a-half hours. We cut and cut, trying to get to that magic point where nothing else can be taken away without compromising the integrity of the structure. For the most part, we adopted a "50-word" rule, noticing that speech (in comedy more than drama) sounded unnatural if the characters spoke more than 50 words at a time. We struggled with the difficulty of imparting background information naturally through the characters' dialogue, but for the most part we believe we've avoided the sort of exposition that James Agee lampooned in "Casablanca": "Oh, Victor, please don't go to the resistance meeting tonight." We aimed for the point at which every moment is important to the plot, without seeming to be so. Words and gestures should seem to be natural, as they are in life - casual, accidental, unplanned. Yet in the play, we wanted all of these words and actions to converge in an unexpected, but - in hindsight - inevitable and tightly woven mesh. (The way, I guess, we hope that everything in real life counts in some unforeseen way as well!) Although the soul of farce is implausibility that seems plausible in its own universe, we ventured further into fantasy than is the norm in the person of Maynard, the cat. We hope he adds a touch of the outlandishly absurd - even the supernatural, if you will - so as to be memorable. We love cats, and he is the distilled essence of feline imperious intractability.
In 1999, "Maynard Dines In" was among four plays chosen (out of 55) for a reading and critique by actors and directors gathered at the Northwest Regional New Plays Conference in Bozeman, Montana. Their observations helped us refine and cut the play to its present shape. Earlier this year, "Maynard Dines In" was one of 17 (out of 120) semi-finalists in the Ukiah, California, New American Comedy Festival competition. We are even more honored and gratified that "Maynard" has won the Jewel Box Theater's award.
Our purpose in writing "Maynard Dines In" was simply to entertain. It contains no profound or provocative insights. We just wanted to write a play that could be produced in any modest American theater and that would leave its audiences, out for a night on the town, satisfied with the evening's entertainment.
Of course, we won't know whether we've been successful until "Maynard Dines In" comes to the stage. Unstaged readings can tell only so much about a play. If we are fortunate enough to interest the Jewel Box Theater in producing "Maynard," we look forward to making the further refinements that will most likely be needed.
-- Lauren Arnest (edited by Mark Arnest)
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