Scott Glander

Playwright

I am an organic writer, though I don’t know if I can tell you what that means. I too am unproduced, I can tell what that means. I am in my 60s now and have been writing plays for over thirty years. Life and playwriting will lead you where they will and it isn’t always where you want or expect to go, yet experience has shown and taught me I’ve needed to go there and so I have. There is an energy in a work of art. When I springboard from another work of art, which I often do, I’m looking to tap into the energy from the original work and hopefully transform it into something new, vital and vibrant. I write plays because I’m a playwright. It isn’t what I do it’s who I am and I know I won’t fully understand who I am unless I write plays.

I too am a balance person. Life at times seems to be one paradox after another and the same is true with writing plays. Birth and death are two sides of the same coin. It is our particular life that joins these two sides of this coin together and completes it. Many people see the Dionysian (inspiration and the accompanying energy) and Apollonian (form and structure) perspectives within creativity as being opposites, but as a playwright I understand they are likewise two necessary and complementing sides of the same coin and need to brought together to make a unified whole (with a tip of the hat to F. David Peat, in The Blackwinged Night). Therefore my job as a playwright is to serve the play: to guide, encourage, respect and protect it. Life has taught me trust is a two-way relationship. Trust takes time to grow and evolve, but trust gained in this manner is trust earned. I need to trust my plays, if I want my plays to trust me. As a human being and as a playwright I live every day within the uncertainty of the creative process. Plays are wrought not written, at least my plays are. There never has been a normal straight line on my pathway through life. We may be told a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but life and playwriting are more indirect and chaotic because this is how people and society are.

My original plays include Shakespeare Restored, about two 18th century editors of Shakespeare, and Ice Cream and Disbelief, a collection of short plays gathered from my first thirty years of writing plays. My adaptations include Six Lessons, from Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, an overlooked acting text/misunderstood play by many (academics and others) within the industry, and Balderdash and Banalysis, or Bandy About the Bard, a collection of spoofs of Shakespeare’s plays.