Few modern-day playwrights are as decorated or prolific as Steven Dietz. He’s produced a plethora of plays that have been performed across the United States and he’s bringing his wealth of knowledge to Amphibian Stage’s Spark Fest, where he’ll share his tricks of the trade with aspiring playwrights July 23.
With 30 plays under his belt, The Chicago Times once labeled Dietz the most ubiquitous American playwright whose name you may have never heard. But Fort Worth isn’t a stranger to him. In the past two years, Amphibian Stage, under the direction of Kathleen Culebro,, has produced revisions of his plays Lonely Planet and Fiction. In addition to Dietz’s seminar on playwriting, there will also be a developmental reading of Dietz’s play Haunted Play (A Tale of the Naive and the Macabre), which he will direct July 23 and 24.. The master class and play are one of several seminars, workshops, and performances taking place during the two-week-long Spark Fest.
“Kathleen [Culebro] is such a force of nature that she makes projects like this happen in addition to the work [Amphibian Stage] does all year,” Dietz says. “I'm teaching a class and doing a play, but that's a small drop in the bucket [compared to] how much stuff they're doing and how great the outreach is in the community in the form of theater, storytelling, and comedy. I'm delighted to be a small part of it.”
Haunted Play, gives an introspective look at writing as a beginner. Dietz revisits the time he began to write and challenges the beginner’s mind.
“There's a piece of us when we were a beginner that holds wisdom,” Dietz says. “It's a hard thing to write about, but I wrote a play. The great thing about Spark Fest and Kathleen is that I'm coming to Amphibian to find out what the answer is to my play.”
Dietz’s master class, titled The Living Play, will teach aspiring playwrights the fundamentals of making a story move through time and status. It’s a class Dietz says a younger version of himself would have loved to take.
“There's such mythology over waiting for a magical idea,” Dietz says. “I'm lucky as hell to have gotten to be a writer for 40 years, but I don't think it's by magic. I think it's weird and unreasonable, but I like to talk candidly about what we can control because it's such a myth for the writer to say they’re at the mercy of their ideas. I just don't buy that. You know that your writing is visceral and complicated.”
“Our writing never quits on us,” he says. “It’s waiting for you every day. Don’t quit on your writing because it will be there for you every minute. You have everything you need. You have 26 letters and thousands of days. That’s what you’re given and what you have. As you get better, it gets harder. I’ve enjoyed the fact that I've gotten to do this for so long. I can trust it the next day.”
