19 July, 2022

Seventeen Back and Forth Scenes on Sitzfleisch Or: What does it mean to write for theatre?

Scene 1

During the early days of the pandemic, while we were all glued to our screens, theatre ended. The option of going places was replaced by the necessity of staying put. Attending a play requires a pilgrimage while writing a play (like all writing) requires sitzfleisch: sitting, staying in place. It’s a discipline to cultivate: to sit. If you stay in the same place long enough, notebook in hand, or hand poised over keyboard, you are creating the necessary conditions. However, for a play- wright (not a TV writer or screenwriter, not in the same way), staying put is only the initial part of the experience. The form itself necessitates the involvement

of other people, not only the actors, designers, director, and producers. A play requires a living, breathing audience of listeners, in the same place at the same time, breathing the same possibly noxious air. Your audience needs to make that pilgrimage and then to practice sitzfleisch.

Scene 2

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Brighde Mullins

Brighde Mullins is a playwright and poet. Her plays have been developed and produced in New York, Dallas, Salt Lake City, London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Her full-length plays include The Bourgeois Pig; Rare Bird; Those Who Can, Do; Monkey in the Middle; Teach; Fire Eater; and Topographical Eden.

She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Playwriting, the Will Glickman Playwriting Award, a Whiting Foundation Award, a gold medal from the Pinter Review, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She has held residencies at Lincoln Center, New York Stage and Film, Mabou Mines (with Lee Breuer), and the Institute for Art and Civic Dialogue (with Anna Deavere Smith). She has been awarded writing residencies at Bard College, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, and has been a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.

Mullins holds MFAs from Yale and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and was a post-graduate fellow at Columbia. She has taught at San Francisco State University, Harvard, and Brown. She is currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California.

Mullins teaches Writing for Stage and Screen at Queens University of Charlotte’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

Contributions by Brighde Mullins