by @dramatistsguild member @carolinevmcgraw

I am comfortable admitting that devising ensembles tend to scare me because, if everyone is the playwright, then what’s the point of me? Does anyone want just my story?

Maybe that’s why the phrase “devised theatre” used to make my insides contract just a little. A caveat: I am pretty new to the practice of it, so I should have zero to minimum say about its vocabulary or name.

But. There is something off about the word devised next to the word theater. It sounds like a mean trick, like “we got around the usual rules” theater. Devious theater, is probably the association I’m making. And as a playwright I kind of like rules, and the breaking of them. But driving around the rules altogether, a secret detour, didn’t sit well.

I think a lot about Konstantin’s plea (or, one of his many pleas) in The Seagull: “We need new forms, and if we can’t have them we had better have nothing.” That is a very old imploration that sometimes feels like it’s fallen on deaf ears for a couple of centuries of kitchen sinks and well mades.

Very cool metaphor alert: maybe devised theater is the Trojan horse that sneaks our new forms through the theater gates. A devising ensemble can get away with a lot because they ARE a lot. When I think of the work of some of my favorite devising companies – Elevator Repair Service, The Assembly, and Seattle’s Satori Group just off the top of my head – the thing they have in common is a lusty and glorious adaptability. The source materials for each production vacillate wildly, but there is always a feeling of strength in numbers. The new form is the form of that company, who gathered and talked and read and made. Who gave an audience a piece and experience that has little or no precedent. The piece’s effect is sometimes difficult to articulate, to break down. And what a relief to not quite be able to talk about how a thing works, but love it anyway.

CAROLINE V. MCGRAW’s plays have been seen at companies around the country, recently at New Georges, Washington Ensemble Theatre, and Ars Nova ANT Fest. She is working on an ensemble generated piece about the humiliation of the Internet with the Satori Group, and a commission for Yale Rep. She was the 2013 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. www.carolinevmcgraw.com