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Cutting the Play
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“How do you cut a play anyhow?"
By Tom Cowley
OK gang, here it is. We are once again approaching OCTAfest season. With this comes the question, “What are we going to do this year?” This is followed by the question, “Can we cut something so it will fit into the 60 minute time limit?” Which leads to the “How do you cut a play anyhow?” question.
I have been asked to express my opinion on this because I allegedly have a lot of festival experience (read- This is an old guy.). Anyhow, what follows are my opinions. They are just that, opinions. Take them for what they are worth.
Opinion 1- DON’T DO IT
Cutting is tricky and fraught with potential problems. It is better to find a good one act or to do parts of a play. There are lots of good one acts. We just are not as familiar with them as we are with the longer stuff we tend to put in our seasons. Get your reading committee busy.
Multi-part plays, such as “All in the Timing”, offer opportunities. You can select several of the self-consistent parts and put together a nice vehicle to demonstrate the acting and directing abilities of your company.
Now I am going to feel like the parent giving the sex lecture to his teenager. You know the “Don’t do it. But if you must-------”.
Don’t cut. But if you must---
Opinion 2 – BE SURE IT IS LEGAL
Get permission before you even start. Some authors forbid cutting their work. Some will allow it only after you talk with them. Most publishing houses have at least some restrictions. Know what is required and do it. The legality of your cutting at the time of festival is an issue with AACT
Opinion 3- BE SURE THE WORK IS CUTTABLE
Many plays do not lend themselves to cutting. It would be foolish to take say “Long Days Journey into Night” (Not that you are allowed to cut an O’Neill play anyhow.) and try to reduce it to less than an hour. The play is just too long.
Plays with many side plots or convoluted sub-text are also poor candidates.
Opinion 4- HAVE A NEUTRAL PERSON DO THE CUTTING
People who have acted or directed a particular show are usually biased toward some scenes or characters. I once had a woman who had played Amanda cut “Glass Menagerie” for me. Her first draft looked like a one-woman show.
If you are dealing with a show you have done, let the cutter go off to some mountaintop where they are free from the “Don’t cut my scenes.” lobby.
Opinion 5- CUT SHORT
When cutting a well-written play (and why bother with a poorly written one.), you will be cutting “good stuff” all the time. There is a tendency to try to keep as much as you can. This can severely pressure the time constraint. I recommend cutting for a run time of 50-55 minutes no matter how much it pains you to discard material.
Opinion 6- CUT ON THE ARC
By this I mean be sure to tell the same story the author intended and to be sure the development, crisis and resolution are all in place. I recently saw a technically magnificent production of “Sweeny Todd” but the cutting was such that if you didn’t know the story ahead of time, you couldn’t follow what they were doing. They favored the music over the plot. The adjudicators were not impressed.
Finally, a short story.
I once did a cutting that I thought was brilliant. The story was intact. The whole thing built and resolved properly. I felt good about it. True, I had eliminated a potential homosexual relationship and a serious husband/wife conflict. But I thought “What the heck, I’ve kept the arc.”
Wrong, wrong. At festival, one of the adjudicators pounded me for the cutting (At least I felt pounded.) After the festival was over, I approached this adjudicator and asked what I should have done? After all the show ran at 59 minutes. There was no way I could have included any sub-plots and stay under the time limit. The advice given was: “Don’t do that show.” Point taken. Hence, Opinion 1 above.
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