A longtime producer of hit TV shows has a new play debuting in Great Barrington, Massachusetts tonight.
A day before the first staged reading of his new play, Matt Williams has been up all night working on re-writes.
“I love in the movies when people sit down at the typewriter, in the old days, or a computer, and knock out a play in three days," said Williams. "Well, I know that can happen, but I think that happens maybe once or twice every 200 million times because you don’t. It’s a process. It’s just grinding away, the tenacity, the determination to stay in there and keep honing it and honing it and honing it until you find the play.”
Williams is best known for his work in television, writing on “The Cosby Show” and creating hit series like “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement.”
“For about 35 years I did a lot of TV, a lot of film, a lot of time in LA, and then about four years ago I said, I’ve done that enough, I want to go back to where my heart lives, where my soul lives, and that’s the theater. And people go, are you crazy, to work that hard?” laughed Williams.
He’s one of the five playwrights showcased in the 12th season of the Berkshire Playwrights Lab.
“For theater, none of this means anything until you put it out there, you don’t know what you have," said BPL Co-founder Joe Cacaci. "As good as Matt is, as good as any of us are, you’re sitting in your room. You don’t know what the hell you wrote. You think you know, but you don’t really know. Then you get a bunch of actors sitting around doing it, and you learn more, obviously, but it’s still just – you’re all kind of part of this little tiny club. The minute you throw it in front of 200, 300 sophisticated people like we have here in Great Barrington, you find out what works and doesn’t work. So it’s scary, but it’s the only possible way to know what the play is.”
Cacaci and BPL co-founder Matt Penn are, like Williams, veterans of television – a shared experience that Cacaci says lends itself to the fast and furious pace of the lab.
“We read more plays than I can remember between January and March and we pick four or five of them," the co-founder told WAMC. "Just the two of us, we have no reading committee, we do it ourselves. And then each play gets four days of rehearsal and then 10 days later we start the next one.”
The process condenses weeks of work into just days – and despite the stress, constant reworking, and ticking clock, Williams says it’s wonderful.
“I was thinking this morning about the phrase ‘baptism by fire,’ and I thought, in a good way, the Berkshire Playwrights Lab is like a kiln," said the playwright. "And once you fire up that kiln and you put the clay object in there and the heat is turned on, you find every crack, every fissure, every flaw in the clay.”
The play Williams has placed in that kiln is titled “Uncertainty,” and is ostensibly about a man being held hostage inside a garage at a golf course.
“And what the play really addresses is I think what’s going on in this country, is class warfare, this disdain, this dismissing of humanity and treating, quote, unskilled labor as if they’re just an algorithm or data instead of flesh and blood human beings," Williams told WAMC. "And when the corporate bottom line supersedes the care and nurturing of humanity, we have a real problem.”
A native of Evansville, Indiana, Williams set out to “explore and expose the anger, rage, and despair” of contemporary American life.
“I watched in the arc of my lifetime where major corporations that were the lifeblood of my city where I grew up systematically shipped away to China, to Mexico, and the impact that that had on my hometown," he said. "It was devastating. It’s not just about losing a paycheck. It’s this ripple effect where people lose their purpose, lose their pride. And when companies pull out like that and leave this vacuum, crime rises, obesity, ill health, housing shortages. Everything beings to fall apart.”
Tonight, all that hard work comes to a head on the stage of the Mahaiwe Performing Arts center, in the way Williams says he thrives the most as a storyteller.
“Where people are there in the moment, experiencing it in the moment, and responding in the moment, and that is what it’s all about," said Williams. "That’s when all this work, all this effort pays off.”
The Berkshire Playwrights Lab staged reading of Matt Williams’ “Uncertainty” is scheduled for 7:30 tonight.
