Rewriting Those Awkward Pauses

English Professor Jay Boyer learned just how fascinating awkward pauses can be during the evolution of one of his latest plays. The idea had come to him while sipping tea in a small London café. He overheard a conversation between a woman and her young lover at a nearby table.

“He was trying to get her to leave her husband and, at the time, I thought how different that situation must look from his perspective than it did from hers,” Boyer recalls.

“And what of her husband? You would have three very different perspectives on the same situation, having to do with where each of those people were in their lives. I became curious how those three people would interact at one key moment, the moment that she was walking out on her husband.”

Boyer let his curiosity take shape in the form of a script, roughing out the first draft for a play within just a few days. He called it Awkward Pauses.

After several rounds of revisions, the piece was ready for its first stage reading at the Edward Albee Theatre Festival in Anchorage, Alaska. It was nicely received, though Boyer reworked the piece further in response to some feedback, and he looked forward to its next reading in London.

Unfortunately, Awkward Pauses was not as well-received the second time around. The ASU professor took it in stride. He went back to work, revising, reshaping, and recasting the piece. A developmental production of Awkward Pauses was later performed at the Tempe Center for the Performing Arts in April 2002. Boyer’s revisions continue.

“One of the great pleasures of playwrighting—as opposed to writing print fiction—is you can keep playing with a play. You can keep toying with it, changing it. It’s never quite done in that sense,” he says.

Boyer is currently toying with a number of other pieces, as well. Three of his newer works received their first readings at the FirstStage/Playwrights Express in Los Angeles in 2002. About the same time, two of Boyer’s more refined plays (Time Goes By, But Slowly; and Poaching Deer in Northern Arizona) were performed together at the Jewel Box Theater Center in Hollywood under the marquee Rural/Urban. The Comedy Channel’s Carrie Quinn Dolin starred in the production.

“I’m not professing myself as one of the university’s playwrights,” he stresses. “I am an amateur in the most basic sense of that word. I look at it as an exercise, and I do it because I enjoy the work in progress.”—Jessica McCann