The Hero's Journey: Pipeline
Cadence’s Pipeline New Works Fellows take their first steps toward a finished script in nine months.
“I’ve often heard this rule: In most well-constructed plays, the inciting incident happens a tenth of the way into the script,” playwright David Lindsay-Abaire told the group of inaugural Pipeline fellows early on the morning of September 29. “I’ve always been skeptical of rules. But as an experiment, I reread a few plays that I admire to see if this ten-percent thing holds any water.” He then asked the fellows to pick up their copies of Marsha Norman’s ’Night Mother, which they had read before their meeting, and turn to page 13. I’m going to kill myself, Mama appeared at the bottom of the page. “There it is,” said Lindsay-Abaire. “That’s the inciting incident. That’s the big, blinking road sign that announces to the audience, ‘The journey has officially begun, and this is where we’re headed.’”
The five playwrights chosen as the first group of Cadence Pipeline New Works Fellows — Brittany Nicole Fisher, Will Inman, Irene Ziegler, and writing duo Sanam Laila Hashemi and Steven Burneson — had been selected for their talent and ability to tell a compelling story. But each of them is still at the beginning of their development as playwrights. That’s where David Lindsay-Abaire comes in. The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (for 2006’s Rabbit Hole) and the celebrated author of works such as Good People (2011), Kimberly Akimbo (2000), and the screenplay for Rise of the Guardians (2012), was spending his weekend in a classroom at Virginia Commonwealth University, drawing on his experience as co-director of Julliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program.
To commit to a nine-month project of creating an entirely new play from start to finish is a daunting enough task. To have your mentor be one of the best-known playwrights of his generation raises the stakes considerably. Looking back, Hashemi recalled, “I was apprehensive and ecstatic heading into the weekend kickoff. I identify as an actor who began dabbling in screenwriting. The notion that I was going to sit at a table with other writers and talk about constructing a story was . . . weird. Knowing that the session would be led by David Lindsay-Abaire only heightened those feelings.”
“I find myself fast-forwarding to June,” said Ziegler, as the workshop began and the fellows opened up about their concerns, “and wondering how we will get there.” “I feel that every day,” Lindsay-Abaire reassured the group. “I’m constantly asking myself, ‘What am I doing? How do I do this?’ I don’t even know what the script is until I get through that first draft.”
The Saturday morning session was devoted to exploring the hero’s journey as the foundation of storytelling. Highlighted by writer Joseph Campbell in his 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the hero’s journey is the “story that crosses cultures,” said Lindsay-Abaire. As Campbell wrote, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” It’s the story of Star Wars, of The Wizard of Oz, of Shrek, Lindsay-Abaire noted. (Lindsay-Abaire knows Shrek well, having written the book and lyrics for Shrek the Musical, which ran on Broadway from December 2008 to January 2010 and has seen many touring and local productions since.)
But a story doesn’t have to be an epic to feature a hero’s journey. At its core, the hero’s journey is one of transformation — where a character gains awareness, overcomes resistance to change, and embarks on a path to self-discovery. “Does every play have to follow this structure? Of course not,” Lindsay-Abaire said. But for the plays that do, he noted, it’s the key to knowing what a character wants and why the audience should care. “We like when characters change,” he said. “We like when they transform as people — that’s what keeps the audience invested. The audience buys tickets because of the first half of a play; they stay because of the second half.”
As Lindsay-Abaire illustrated for the fellows, a well-constructed play links a character’s external journey to a character’s internal journey. The external journey involves a call to adventure, the initial refusal of that call and eventual crossing of a threshold, multiple tests and ordeals, a major setback, and the resolution and aftermath. The internal journey tracks these external forces, starting with the character’s increased awareness, moving through experiencing the consequences of change, and ending with the redoubling of efforts toward eventual mastery of a problem. In short, both journeys involve a separation, a descent, an initiation, and a return.
The Wizard of Oz, he continued, provides a familiar example. Our hero, Dorothy, experiences an external journey from Kansas to Munchkinland (dramatically indicated by the change from black-and-white to Technicolor), along the Yellow Brick Road and its challenges on the way to Oz, and back home again to Kansas. But she also experiences an internal journey: she starts the movie as restless and uncertain of her place in the world; is initially resistant to change but eventually trusts her new friends as she prepares for the journey ahead; finds a mentor in Glinda the Good Witch and an important tool in the ruby slippers; experiences an identity transformation in being bold enough to confront the Wicked Witch of the West; and is rewarded with new self-awareness and a realization that “there’s no place like home.”
Reflecting back on her experience over the weekend, Irene Ziegler noted, “The weekend was a master class in playwriting structure, character development, and story arc. I loved hearing the ideas pitched by the other fellows. David had something encouraging and specific to say about each one, and I’m in awe of my fellow playwrights. I’m very excited to apply what I learned to my own ideas and see what surprises my characters have in store for me.”
Sanam Laila Hashemi agreed. “David was gracious with questions, big and small, and even more thoughtful with his responses,” she said. “I entered the room with feelings bordering on fraudulent and left feeling pretty overwhelmed by the challenges ahead, but I’m also eager to take those challenges on.”
Brittany Nicole Fisher added, “I can’t even begin to thank [Cadence Artistic and Managing Director] Anna [Senechal Johnson], David, and Cadence as a whole for offering such an amazing opportunity to work with David and these other wildly talented writers. I can’t wait to see where the projects that we’ve all created go from beginning to end and see how they change and grow as the program goes on.”
What did Lindsay-Abaire anticipate would happen over the weekend, as a seasoned playwright and educator? “Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I knew I’d be presenting the writers with a bunch of ideas about structure and how plays might be built, and I hoped that there would be a lot of discussion, but I didn’t know how they might respond to any of it. I didn’t know if I’d get any kind of resistance. Turns out, I didn’t at all. What I got instead were five incredibly open writers who were engaged and totally game. They were curious and eager to dig in and try stuff out. They seemed to understand that I wasn’t assigning set rules or formulas. I was presenting them with some basic dramatic principles that have proven to work since . . . well, since people have told stories.”
The weekend may have given the fellows the push they needed, but the next steps are up to them: plot development, giving characters a voice, and ensuring their story’s structure brings the audience along to the play’s conclusion. “I fully expect and hope that they’ll take the principles we talked about and translate them in whatever way is most helpful and productive to them,” said Lindsay-Abaire. “They need to make the plays their own. And that’s what I’m most looking forward to – just seeing how the plays develop, and how the writers interpret everything we talked about. I’m excited to see them make choices, and discoveries, and lose their way, and find their way back, and focus in on whatever the story is that they’re trying to tell.”
Back in the VCU classroom, Lindsay-Abaire concluded the morning’s exploration of the hero’s journey — drawing bold diagrams on the whiteboard, gesturing to the charts and graphs he had distributed, reassuring the fellows that the structure would support them whenever they hit a snag in their writing. He paused, taking in the fellows’ expressions. Their faces reflected their own journey as playwrights over the course of just a few hours — and the challenge of the task before them: a finished play by June. “So, it’s easy,” he said, to laughter, pointing to the whiteboard. “Just follow that!”
David Lindsay-Abaire will return this weekend for round two of his in-person visit with the Pipeline Fellows! Photo courtesy of Chris Lindsay-Abaire.
