Eric Henry Sanders is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, film producer, and director from Brooklyn. Sanders’s plays and films have had productions and screenings in London, Paris, Berlin, Edinburgh, and throughout the US.
He will be teaching narrative and screenwriting at Amherst College in 2023, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. Recently he co-wrote the book SceneWriting: The Missing Manual for Screenwriters with Chris Perry.
1. What was your inspiration to write Maybe, Probably?
I don’t usually write autobiographical plays but if I’ve written any, this is probably it.
It started when my wife and I started thinking about having a baby and experiencing the craziness that you go through during that process. Of course, it’s different for everyone, and one of the really fun things about rehearsing this play with different groups is that you always get to hear their stories. Three of the four actors and the director have children of their own and they all have their own experiences, but they all play into this story because of the universal human struggle it represents. Even if you don’t have kids or are not considering it, hopefully, you will relate.
2. As a playwright do you start with the story you want to tell, or do you start with the protagonist and their objective?
It was really hard to write this play because it’s not a traditional narrative. This is a love story, but in most love stories the obstacle keeping a couple apart is that they don’t like each other, or there are adverse circumstances like that they are in other relationships. In this play they love each other, and they want to be together, and they are together, so what’s keeping them apart is the fear of what might happen to their relationship should something go terribly wrong with the pregnancy or the baby. Figuring all of that out and building that conflict into the plot as a way to separate the two protagonists took me a long time to puzzle out.
3. What is your process when starting to write a play?
I always start with my inspiration – a question I want to explore, or an unfamiliar situation – and build out from there. I keep a notebook that I don’t mind scribbling away in – there’s always a lot of bad writing and rewriting before you are able to get to the good stuff. Inspiration usually hits when I’ve let down my guard, like just as I’m falling asleep, but it’s important to scribble those notes down. . The next step is to compile all those messy notes into a rough outline. I believe in the maxim that all great writing is rewriting, so then the process becomes about refining the work over and over again.
There’s a saying “write what you know,” which I don’t believe. I think if you have technique, you can write whatever you want. But inevitably your life will bleed into it anyway. You can’t help that.
My first draft of this play was probably eight years ago. This play was supposed to happen pre-Covid and the delay gave me an opportunity to continue refining the script. Every time I develop it, it changes a little bit and hopefully it gets better and better each time.
This is my twelfth full-length play. I haven’t published most of them, and this is to the point that plays are never really done. Even tonight there were a couple of lines I wanted to edit in order to tighten them up.
4. Do you workshop your work and collaborate with actors to develop your plays?
Of course, you have to. You must hear it out loud and get good actors and people that are enthusiastic about the text and willing to do it.
I’m a very structural thinker when it comes to writing and I find that when an actor knows how to create a beat it’s because the structural underpinnings of a scene are working. I try to give actors a specific goal in each scene and across scenes, something that they want and need from the other characters around them. From scene to scene there are specific scene desires, and when you’re writing, you have all these broad ideas and you start to arrange them in order toward that overarching desire. But those little scene desires are what propel the scene along; you can imagine it as a staircase where every scene gets bigger and bigger until the conclusion of the play. By contrast, when an actor is struggling with a beat or a scene, it’s often because I haven’t given them a specific enough goal to pursue. Figuring that out in readings and development is critical to the revision process for a script.
5. And do you know the ending of the play when you are still in the process of conceptualizing?
There are only four endings: There’s the happy ending where the protagonist gets what they want, so the lovers get together; there’s the sad ending where they are irrevocably parted; and there are two ironic endings, the ironic happy one where they get what they wanted but they realize it’s not what they truly wanted, and there’s the ironic sad ending which is they didn’t get what they want but there’s this better thing over here. I’ll usually have an idea about the tone I want to create with an ending and which of these four choices best suits the particular play I’m working on.
6. What are the main differences between putting on a play in London compared to the US?
The two places I end up working, more often than not, are New York and London, and there are a lot of similarities. One major difference is about how a play gets put on – how a venue is selected – but once you’re in it, I feel like brilliant people are brilliant people no matter where they are, and there is incredible talent to be found no matter where you are working.
7. One of the things that stood out to me in the play tonight was the naturalist and unapologetic writing. The actors were constantly interrupting each other as happens in real life as well. Did you write that in the script?
I absolutely love puzzling out dialogue, how a character speaks and what their preoccupations are. Part of the fun is following a character’s flow of thoughts even if it is contrary to, or ignored by, other characters on stage. For example, I love to find those moments when characters are following their own thoughts in parallel, as people do in real life. When this happens, it often leads to characters interrupting each other. I believe that the audience can be incredibly astute about following multiple tracks and it can be a wonderful way to engage them in the action of the play.
And fortunately I’m working with brilliant actors – Cory English, Christy Meyer, Maria Teresa Creasey, and Lance Fuller – all of whom are magnificent at finding those rhythms of speech. They are also wonderful at taking the script’s punctuation seriously, looking for those dashes where interruptions happen. In one rehearsal I was like “you know there’s a dash at the end of that line?” and the actors immediately were cutting each other off the next time and it made the scene work so much better. And for people who are writing a lot, you’ll start to hear the music in it and once it gets to that rhythm the conversations are so natural.
One thing I talk about in my book is that if every line is like 20 syllables long, the audience is going to get bored so even if you have important things to say, you have to vary the length, vary the rhythm and explore things like having people cutting each other off.
And again, I also realized you can really respect your audience because they’ll get it, they’ll hear what is being said even if characters are talking over each other because we, as humans, do that all the time.
Another aspect of dialogue that I love playing with is the nonlinearity of subject matter. Conversations can encompass multiple subjects and bounce around between them because, again, that’s what we do in real conversations all the time and audiences will get it. I always apologize to my actors, though, because that nonlinearity can make memorizing a script much more difficult. But once they have it down, as this cast does, the dialogue sings.
8. How can actors be better facilitators of your work? What do you seek in actors that work with you?
I’m going to give two answers because in auditions I love to see strong choices even if it’s not necessarily what I saw when I wrote the character, but I love to see an actor who really grabs an idea and runs with it. Often in auditions if the first reading is hesitant, it doesn’t work as well.
The next thing I look for is in the rehearsal space where an actor is given the opportunity for feedback and direction. Even in production, like tonight, we had a change in the play from previous nights and the actors were able to integrate some new ideas brilliantly. As in the writing process where revision is so important, I love working with actors on refining a performance and bringing out nuances that often none of us saw at the outset.
9. What does the future hold for this play? And are you already in the process of writing a new play or movie?
With the success of this production, I would love to see it transfer to a West End venue, if I possibly can make that happen, and there’s been some talk about that. I’m lucky enough to be working with such a special group of gifted performers, and they have dedicated themselves to the text beyond anything that a writer could hope for, so I would love to reward their efforts with more exposure in addition to the accolades that they have already received.
As for next projects, I have a reading in Massachusetts of a new play I’m developing, Play With Time, about the classical composer Philip Glass and an interview that took place between him and the artist Fredericka Foster. They were asked to speak on the subjects of Buddhism, physics, art, and time as material for an article that came out a year or two ago for Nautilus Magazine. It was a relatively short article but I received permission to use the two and a half hour-long conversation as the raw material for a new play. I’m extremely excited about the resulting play which I am currently developing with Donald Sanders (no relation), who is an incredible director and brilliant thinker in his own right. And I always have new writing in the works.