MICHAEL BETTENCOURT muses with 
Michael Bettencourt
Playwright
Beyond the Slice
I have a "trick" when I'm writing that helps me get a character "unstuck": I give the character an accent, often Irish (though I find Spanglish, Cockney, Trainspotting Scottish, and certain North Carolina regional accents energizing as well). And more often than not, the moment I do, the character's throat unsticks and all sorts of interesting things stream out.
Not that what issues forth is particularly "Irish" in the sense of a native from, say, CountyDonegal or Dublin -- that is, it's not "authentic" in any cultural or linguistic sense. What comes out is Bettencourt's poetry dressed in something faux. In other words, tricked out in a cultural expropriation.
Because I'm an outsider to Spanish and to such accents as "Southern" and British/Scottish/Irish, there is always that danger of exoticizing what others see as perfectly culturally normal. Yet there is a music in them that strikes my ear as music -- as a lilt or a cadence or a syntactical
rearranging that carries velocity and rhythm. This, then, has an effect on the sense/sensuality of the language (which to me is denotative meaning along with a "feel" that language gives, a feel of the denotations rippling out on deeper connotative or emotional/wordless levels). The music also affects body posture/spatial movements since the body, as an instrument, cannot help but respond to the rhythms of the music coming out of it and into it. (I've noticed this in actors -- for instance, in my short play The Greed Gene, when the doctor is encouraged to try a German accent, the whole posture/approach of the actor changes -- he or she finds a way to make the language work with comic effect.)
I don't feel guilty about this, but I am always aware of what I'm doing because, for better or worse (and I think it has been for the better), post-modern deconstructings have sensitized us all about issues of cultural ownership and annexation.
But I also ask myself why I need to do this -- that is, why does it happen then why I choose a tonality and rhythm outside my own experiences -- outside what is supposedly the "authentic" voice of my life -- more and interesting things happen in my writing, not only with characters' voices but also with choices of themes and ideas?
It's all about going beyond the "slice of life."
The concept of theatrical art presenting a "slice of life" is boring. The writing teacher's canard about "Write what you know" -- how boring. When a character of mine slips into an accent, then I am writing about what I don't know -- and that is infinitely more interesting to me because it forces me out of my cultural labyrinth and onto a more open road.
My accents speak literally about the diversity of the world around us. If we only hear reinforced in the theatre (as we do on television) a kind of flat standard American-speak (most prevalent in news media, but also in bureaucratese and corporate-speak), then we get flat standard American-speak plays and situations. (Dare I say "white"?)
For me, playing with these accents is a way to try to enter other worlds/lives -- yes, to mine them for dramatic purposes (appropriate, exploit), to live inside lives I have not lived in, even to create from whole cloth "stage cultures" that have no basis in the reality of my life or in anybody's life. (But since when is the stage about "real life"? And what does that phrase mean anyway?) I realize that by doing this I am trying, through the power of imagination, to break myself out of the large misdirected American culture that has shaped me. By this imaginative power, this middle-class "privileged by whiteness" white male hopes to broaden himself by linking with other sparking multi-world diversities -- in short, to get away from being so "white bread" and into the vast expanse of an unsliced world at play.
I think our theatrical writers need to break themselves out of the mentality of theatre as a slice of life in order to create scripts that not only "work" (another boring theatrical concept) but vibrate and flex. I have been doing a lot of reading for theatres lately for various competitions and festivals -- plays of all lengths -- and I get tired of the sameness of the situations and ideas the writers choose. Yet again another play about an ad executive seeking fulfillment beyond the corporate world, yet again another play about a relationship that may or may not have communication issues, and so on -- stuff extruded from other stuff (video, television, movies), stuff based on narrow theatrical concepts of conflict and resolution and "arc," stuff that shows little imagination (though often great dollops of cleverness and craftiness). But the writers don't create "stage worlds," don't have an explosive sense of what theatre can do within the field of its own four walls. It's all about mimicking a narrow band of what has been privileged as real life, a band that has already been boiled down and re-molded by corporate entertainment entities.
Good writing of any kind doesn't come from writing about what you know but writing about what you ache to know, need to know -- writing that comes from a hunger that must be filled. Writing that comes from who you aren't, or aren't yet. Only in this way can writers get beyond the slice that is their life into life at large, and write things that are precious and trustworthy and full of a full humanity. We need more and more and more of this.
©2004 Michael Bettencourt
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