At the PWC this week: Gabriel Jason Dean

Core Writer Gabriel Jason Dean is at the Playwrights’ Center this week, workshopping his new play Heartland with director Jeremy Wilhelm and actors Steve Epp, Megan Burns, and Jameal Ali. Learn a bit about Gabriel in this mini-interview.

What’s something about playwriting that you had to learn the hard way?

• Embrace your collaborators as family, which means love and fight with equal passion.
• Risk failure daily.
• Treasure silence on the page.
• The first draft is the purest in what it has to say. Listen to it.
• Don't write what you know. Write to discover what you know.
• Whenever you think your writing is getting weird, push yourself to get weirder.
• Comparison leads to resentment. Resentment leads to self-pity. Self-pity leads to plays that no one but you wants to see.
• Playwriting is listening.

Finish this sentence: If I weren’t a playwright I would be…

An astrophysicist / cosmologist. I’m a total geek for all things space. My math abilities are OK, but I’d be eager to improve them. I think I’m attracted to the field for many of the same reasons I’m attracted to playwriting…as an astrophysicist, you’re charged with giving provable meaning to things that are essentially unprovable. Both are about finding elegance in chaos or just letting the chaos be elegant. Both fields require an intense amount of listening…often for things that aren’t being said.

What do you do when you’re stuck on something you’re writing?

The best thing I can do when I’m stuck is to move to something else. I find that following the path of least resistance yields the best results. I work where I’m passionate at the moment, where the work has the most heat for me. That means my process is messy and very rarely linear. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy cracking open a difficult moment in a play, but I don’t force it. If I force it, the audience can tell. I like to leave time and space for the play to transform and organically become what it wants to be. I also like to leave room for my collaborators. When I’m stuck and can’t figure something out, I’ll share it with a trusted collaborator and just talk through it. Sometimes we figure it out and sometimes the conversation doesn’t make sense until years later.