We asked Jack Novak, playwright THE GREAT LIEUTENANT SPRINKLE DID’T SAVE ME, to write about his writing process and where this new play got its roots.
For me, the process of writing and revising a play is different every time, unique to the particular play I’m working on. Sometimes one scene will pop into my head, and the rest of the play will fall out from that. Other times I’ll write extensive notes and create an outline, then flesh those out into a complete play. Small things change as well--some plays need to be written early in the morning, while other plays are written between the hours of 11pm and 3am. Some plays I have to write in silence, while, with others, I listen to music (the music, of course, changing with every play, as well--with Sprinkle it was a lot of atmospheric rock and electronic music).
The Great Lieutenant Sprinkle Didn’t Save Me came into the world as a ten-minute play. I was selected as one of the writers for Rorschach Theatre’s Klecksography project, in which they randomly group together writers, directors, and actors, give the writers a prompt, and then give them exactly one week to create and rehearse a short play. Our prompts were articles about haunted buildings in DC, and the one I received (I don’t actually remember if I got to choose it, or if it was handed to me) involved a story about a haunted police station. Well, a haunted police sub-station. The story was actually quite simple: an officer, alone at night in the substation, saw a figure on the security cameras, then checked the building and found no one there. In the article, the author made a loose supposition that the haunting figure could have some connection to Officer Joshua L. Sprinkle--an actual historical figure in local DC history.
This haunting is not the most gripping or terrifying of tales, certainly, and the officers who were at the substation when director Maureen Monterubio and I went to visit it were not more than mildly interested in the idea that their building might be haunted. The building itself is not terribly remarkable, although it is one of the oldest active police buildings in DC. However, I felt there was some potential in the elements we had to start with, and that night I got to work.
This first version of the play had to, by necessity, be one of those plays written into the late hours--we were given the prompt on Saturday, and had to come in Sunday morning with a script. So I let it flow out.
The cast I had been assigned included two men and one woman. The men’s roles were clear: a police officer and a ghostly figure. For the woman, I made my first major addition to the original story--another witness to the haunting. She started as “The Officer’s Wife.” (in many of my plays I find that I give my characters names that describe them, as opposed to normal names like “Greg” or “Alice.” I think it’s because I find those names too limiting, preferring titles that are archetypical) However, as I invested in the character I realized that she needed to be defined by herself, and not by her relationship to the police officer, so she became “A History Major.”
That night, when I wrote the ten-minute version, I immediately found myself latching onto the relationship between the two “mortals”--their dialogue clipped along and came so naturally to me. I ultimately had to remind myself that this needed to be a ten-minute play, and, although I felt there was so much more to discover in their relationship, I moved on, going deeper into the haunting.
In the haunting itself, I also began to discover trails that I wanted to explore more fully than the ten-minute time limit would allow, and so I had to satisfy myself with mysterious flashes of ghostly activity. However, those fast-moving fragments, we discovered, worked well for the play. Leaving a lot of the story beneath the surface made the play extra creepy, because you couldn’t quite explain it. You didn’t feel safe, and that was delightfully, eerily ironic for a play set in a police station.
I should say that I don’t think Sprinkle would have ever made the jump from Klecksography to a full-length production by Field Trip without the great fortune of the artists I got to work with in that first ten-minute version. I found Maureen to be a perfect collaborator who spoke the same theatrical language as me, and had the same investment in this play, despite it’s humble origins. The actors, Kyle Encinas, Emma Jackson, and Lee Liebeskind, also helped to bring out the depth of these characters.
Adapting the ten minute play to a full length was a new challenge for me. And I do think “adapting” is the right way to describe it. A ten minute play is a very different format from a full length play, and turning the ten-minute play into the full length play felt not unlike adapting a story or novel. I knew that there were a number of things I wanted to explore more fully, so I had to figure out how best to go about it. For a moment it crossed my mind that I would just take the original ten-minute script and expand it in certain sections, but then I realized that that wouldn’t work. I needed to tap into the same flow that had allowed me to pump out the ten-minute play in a night. If I tried to air-drop myself back into the ten-minute play and pick up mid-stride I felt I would be destined for writer’s block or a disappointing, inorganic version of the ideal play I wanted to write. So I chose to start with a blank page, without even looking at the ten-minute play, and see what would happen.
This did present some challenges, but it also allowed me to keep the discoveries of the story fresh and authentic. I really enjoyed getting to know the couple better (they ended up engaged, rather than married, as this felt stronger in the new version). Their relationship became much more central to the play than it had been before.
Delving deeper into the haunting produced the most difficulty. I wanted to keep the same feeling of mystery while at the same time exploring the story of the spirit (or spirits--you’ll have to see it and decide for yourself!) more fully than I had before. In adapting to a full-length format, new questions were raised. The motives of the spirit had to be very clear to be sustained for a longer time. Our dramaturg Allison Bucca, and Maureen, helped bring all these questions into the light. Finally, after an afternoon of sitting on my porch and talking to myself (out loud), I came to some final decisions that led to the last (major) rewrite.
And that’s the short version of how I came to write the play that you’ll see this May! This is still only the beginning of Sprinkle’s life, and I’m looking forward to seeing what new ideas the production will give me for the next version of this story!
