Editing Beowulf
"Horses and swords, horses and swords and hoooooorses."
If you saw Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage last year, those lyrics must be familiar.
Beowulf won the Glickman Award for best new play to premiere in the Bay Area in 2008--and Theatre Bay Area magazine publishes the Glickman winner in each June/July double issue. I've been editing Beowulf for the past few weeks, and every time I read it again, I get this earworm.
This is the fifth Glickman winner we'll publish--I can't believe we've done five already. And I love editing plays. Before Theatre Bay Area took over administration of the Glickman, I couldn't figure out the best way to select a play for publication, which I always wanted to do, like American Theatre.
And now I've published work by Liz Duffy Adams, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and even Leigh Fondakowski. I believe that all the Glickman plays that appeared in the magazine were the first time these plays had been published. And I still get calls and emails about them. Just last month a guy from Australia was looking for The People's Temple by Leigh Fondakowski et al. Apparently the only place to find that play is still in Theatre Bay Area.
What does editing a play entail? Well, because all of the scripts have been working scripts, there's no need for the playwrights to concern themselves with making sure all mentions of things like time, numbers, streets are consistent. They may use both numerals and spelled-out numbers; they may use all different forms of time. Whether a number is a numeral or spelled out makes no different when viewing the play. The actor reads it aloud the same way. But the people reading the play at home do notice the inconsistencies.
So, I set a basic style sheet. For Beowulf, all numbers (except in characters, such as Warrior 1) were spelled out. (To compare, in the magazine in general, we spell out one through nine and use numerals for 10 and greater.) The style sheet also notes spellings of characters, whether parenthetical stage directions take end punctuation and whether they are in italics--things like that. I read the script over and over until I catch everything in the style sheet. You can't catch everything all at once, so I take a pass making sure the section headings were treated the same: boldface, title case (not all caps), stage direction one line break after the heading. A second pass to focus on character names, another on basic proofreading in the dialogue, another and another....
No matter how many times I read the scripts, something stays with me. It may, like in Beowulf's case, be the lyric earworms. Reading The People's Temple over and over was emotionally draining--there were many scenes that made me teary every single time. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's Hunter Gatherers just made me giggle a lot.
A unique challenge with the Beowulf script is how to format the lyrics in cases when, for example, many characters sing the same lines simultaneously, or when they do call and responses. The original script divided these section into columns and rows, where the character headed the column and the lyrics made up the rows. We're having problems fitting all the lyrics on one row in our two-column script format, so we may end up breaking up the columns into a regular script format. It's worth mentioning that Beowulf is the first "musical" we've published, though creator Jason Craig doesn't call it a musical; he calls it a songplay. We won't be publishing the actual music, created by Dave Malloy.
Jason, like all the playwrights, has been wonderful to work with. Most of them hadn't had a full play published before, and all of them have seemed very happy with the final product. And that makes me happy, because the main reason why I like editing the magazine is because I enjoy other people's art, and I want to help share it with others. I can do that with features in the magazine, but the playscripts are much more immediate. I hope you enjoy Beowulf, upcoming in the June/July double issue, hitting the streets in the beginning of June.
posted by Karen McKevitt @ 3:18 PM
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