So I’m in the middle of this new play to take place in different locations on Nantucket. I write an important scene to come early in the proceedings in which Guy A tells Guy B information necessary for the play to go on.  I didn’t know where to set this specific meeting.  I’m itchy to get into the meat of the play. I want to get on with it.  I set the meeting in a bar. It’s one of the mainstays, right? The Iceman Cometh. The Time of Your Life. Two Trains Running. Lynn Nottage won this year’s Pulitzer for her terrific bar play, Ruined. Wasn’t the most famous, albeit un-produced, bar play Everybody Comes to Rick’s which achieved immortality when it went directly to the screen and became Casablanca? [Note: Has anyone ever read or done this play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison?] 

So these two guys go into a bar. I plopped them down and let the information come out. So why won’t this scene come alive? A bar’s a sure-fire setting. Why are my matches damp?

I try tarting up the setting to make it more vivid. A blizzard in Bus Stop trapped mismatched people. Nantucket being an island gets easily fogged in. My two guys are stuck. This makes drama. Forget it. My play takes place on a sunny day in July. 

I looked at the stage directions for Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers. “The action takes place in front of Agamemnon’s tomb.” 

An old bell rang.   

I was fifteen.  My mother and I visited her successful brother in his suite at the Pierre while he was in New York on a business trip.  Desultory conversation, then she suddenly asked him to tell me the secret of success.  Uncle Success shrugged: ‘Simple. Always go where the action is.’ My mother turned to me. ‘See?’ 

Go where the action is?  What kind of advice is that? Where else would you want to be?  But it’s the secret of success. 

Could my stillborn scene work if I set it in a hotel room?  Hot L Baltimore. Plaza Suite. A boarding house like Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The Lower Depths. Nantucket in July?  My two guys couldn’t get a room if they tried.  Besides, both guys lived on Nantucket. 

Why not set the scene in the good old reliable living room, the domestic stronghold of modern drama.  Do I want Nora’s perfect Doll’s House? The haunted cottage of Long Day’s Journey? The Brooklyn apartment of God Of Carnage or the bachelor pad of Boeing-Boeing?  Do I set my scene in the cramped rooms of Stanley and Stella Kowalski’s or is it the Loman’s being suffocated by new buildings?  A glamorous estate like The Philadelphia Story? A dump like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  No. One of my two guys just left his home and doesn’t want to go back. The other guy is locked out. Virginia Woolf makes me think of Albee.

  When I was starting, Albee’s Zoo Story inspired so many park bench plays that producers could have installed a permanent bench on the stage of any New York theatre to house its hundreds of imitations. Would my two guys meeting at a park bench solve anything? No.

I love plays that show men at work. Glengarry Glen Ross; The Kitchen; Detective Story; The Front Page. But Guy B is a writer on vacation.  Guy A’s a Viet Nam vet recently out of hospital.  Could I put B back in hospital? A & B meet in a hospital room? Yes! Wit. 33 Variations.  Men In White. No. My guys are healthy.

Fifty years of writing plays and I can’t find the setting that will generate that action.  

“The action takes place in front of Agamemnon’s tomb.” 

So what about Agamemnon’s tomb?  Nantucket has lots of cemeteries. Hey, Act Three of Our Town.  Hamlet. Act V Scene ii.  Hamlet returns to Denmark, not knowing that Ophelia is dead.  How will he react once he finds out?  That’s the action. The general setting is Elsinore. How would I tackle finding the specific setting for the scene in which Hamlet learns tragic information?  That’s one way I work. To solve a problem, I’ll try to imagine how I’d re-do a famous scene. So I’m writing Hamlet. Easy. Hamlet returns home in the rain into the castle and sees a coffin inside the chapel. A funeral is going on. Who’s in the box? Ophelia! No! Grief!  Yes, that’s the logical setting.  Plus music and religious spectacle. 

My choice embarrasses me.  Shakespeare sets that scene in a graveyard in broad daylight inhabited by two clowns who are gravediggers. Hamlet passes the graveyard and discovers the gravedigger in the grave itself. Talk about going where the action is.  The gravedigger shows Hamlet Yorick’s skull, triggering Hamlet’s cool rumination on the nature of life and death. Only then does the funeral procession arrive and Hamlet learns this grave will receive Ophelia. Hell breaks loose, propelling us out of the graveyard into the final showdown between Laertes and Hamlet.  

Look at the range of colors Shakespeare gives himself in finding the exact setting that will generate the energy to hurtle us into the next and final scene.  That’s what I haven’t considered. I’ve been so focused on my scene that I’ve forgotten the next scene. What energy do I need this scene to generate to move, no, hurl the play into the next? 

Will my stillborn scene work if the two guys meet in the local graveyard?  No. Out at sea? O’Neill’s sea plays. In some sensational setting. I once saw a play set on K2, two men trapped on a mountain. Nantucket’s flat. No, the setting I’m looking for must not overwhelm the intention of the scene. I’m trying to be fancy. Try truth.

What about the theatre itself?   Pirandello’s revolution was setting Six Characters In Search of an Author not just in the theatre itself, but rather the very theatre that we are in tonight. Two Guys in Search of a Setting. No.  

I check the papers for inspiration. The New York Times’ July 14, 2009 has a headline: Illnesses Afflict Homes With a Criminal Past. Houses previously occupied and contaminated by Meth addicts now poison those houses’ new innocent occupants. That’s a setting worthy of Ibsen. But not for this.

I just have to get the info out. But that’s the problem. I’m just getting the info out. I might as well Xerox the info in the scene and hand it out to the audience.  

Alexander Pope advised that we ‘consult the genius of place in all things’. Shakespeare yet again finds the scene’s true setting – the genius of place where the action is. 

I thought of The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov sets both Act One and Act Four not in the public rooms of the estate but in the childhood nursery of Ranevskaya and her brother.  When they return home, this is their immediate destination. When they leave, this is where they say goodbye – leaving the old servant behind.  Setting it in the nursery gives his actors, director, designers and audience the key information needed to dramatize the level of emotional maturity of these characters and the destruction their infantile state wreaks on their world. 

The Three Sisters.  Masha confesses her illicit love for Vershinin not in the drawing room of the first and second acts or in the garden of the fourth.  Chekhov sets her great sexual revelation in a bedroom during a raging fire in the town. 

The first three acts of Uncle Vanya take place in the public parts of the house. But Chekhov sets the final act in Vanya’s work room, now his prison, in which he and Sonya will spend the rest of their lives, dreaming of a freedom that will never come. Chekhov’s individual settings feed the life of the entire play. 

That’s my problem. I’m photo-shopping a setting as if it were wallpaper. My bar is a blue screen against which I’ve pasted action.  No wonder my scene feels so mechanical. 

Because there is no such thing as a neutral setting in a play.  I made it too easy for B to convey information to A.  My problem was not making the bar setting work but rather finding a setting that would prevent them from exchanging information. I must earn the giving of this info.  

Setting and action are not synonyms.  The setting must not only generate the action, but give clues instructing the actors, director and designers on how to interpret that scene. 

I looked at the reality of Nantucket. I found a setting that I think will prevent B from giving the info so easily. Let’s hope I finish the play and it gets on.

  Because I’d like to write a courtroom play.  Inherit the Wind. Witness for the Prosecution. One of the guys will be a lawyer and the other a defendant. No, get off Nantucket first.