The Dotted Logline

Playwriting was one of the best workshops I took while working on my MFA at Emerson. It was also the most aggravating. I was focused primarily on screenwriting, which was all tight structure and tighter dialogue and plotting everything out down to the tiniest little detail in advance. Playwriting was all about letting things flow and meander where they wanted in the hopes that they would eventually come together into something beautiful, perhaps even coherent. It was a very organic process. Scary as hell, too.

But my playwriting professor, Betsy Carpenter, must have been doing something right. Her class swept the playwriting fellowship awards at least three years in a row, with the winners (myself included) receiving full productions from the very same theater department that vastly outnumbered us in number of entries. And this was despite a deadline that was increasingly pushed back to cripple the workshop and us sacrificing most of class one week for a “field trip” to the pub next door to watch a few innings of the Red Sox/Yankees game (a trip that was both completely dry and top secret, of course.)

Betsy ended up being my graduate thesis adviser. As my thesis was a screenplay and I was working on it long distance to avoid paying another year’s rent in Boston, I was a little concerned about how things would work out. Betsy was great, in an incredibly odd way, but she was rather unpredictable too, much like playwriting itself. It was a a bit of a scary prospect.

Scarier when I didn’t hear back from from her about my preliminary draft for a few months.

When I did finally hear from her, Betsy told me that the screenplay would certainly pass the thesis defense in its current state, but she thought that I could do better. It was tepid, as she put it.

She had two words of advice. “Watch Brazil.”

So I did. And she was right. Brazil showed me exactly what was wrong with my script and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. In the end, there was very little “defense” needed for my thesis defense.

I was in Boston for two weeks to wrap up all of my thesis business. During that time, Betsy invited me to not only sit in on, but participate in two classes and three readings for her current playwriting workshop. She told me several times how great it was to have me back. It was great to be back.

I just received word from my friend Alex, a classmate and friend from the playwriting workshop, that Betsy Carpenter passed away this morning. She had been undergoing cancer treatment for several years. I don’t think I’d known that.

I hadn’t spoken to her since I finished my thesis. I kept meaning to e-mail her but I was waiting until I had some news to tell her about my play. I wish I had dropped her a note to say hello, to let her know that I did make it out to LA after all, to tell her that I have never gotten better advice crammed into two small words.