The best collaborative relationship I’ve ever had was also the most difficult.

In my post last week about looking for “my” director, I referred to a woman I used to work with several years ago who is now, sadly (for me, not for her), no longer making theater. We collaborated on three projects: a production of one of my plays, a workshop of another, and a year-long collaborative play development project. Two of those projects were, to my mind, very successful; the third just didn’t quite make it, for reasons that don’t really matter. I’ve spent more hours in the theater with her than with almost any other person I’ve worked with, save for perhaps one or two actors who’ve been several of my shows. She was more skilled at making my writing better than (almost) anyone I’ve worked with… and I’ve worked with a lot of people.

The thing is: it wasn’t always easy. No, let me be more direct than that—it was never, ever easy. Sure, we had a few lighter moments here and there, a few hours when things were just sailing along smoothly… but most of the time, we would hammer away at almost every single line I wrote, testing each one against the actors in the room until either a) the line broke at its weak spot and we set about rebuilding it, or b) the actors found their way to the line’s truth. We were unrelenting.

I don’t think many playwrights expect theater to be so demanding. I don’t think young authors realize that first productions of plays—heck, even second and third productions—mean putting the play through a kind of alchemical fire that (hopefully) burns out any impurities.

That’s the nature of collaboration. What it demands of a playwright is this odd dissociation. The playwright has to be able to stare at the beautiful lines she’s written and detach herself completely from them. (Is a Buddhist meditation practice what’s wanted here?) She has to be able to say “I know it’s hurting me to cut this and change this, but the pain is only in my mind.” She has to be able to see the work on its own terms, as it really is, not as she wants it to be.

A good collaborator can help you do that. A great collaborator, however, can make you feel at peace, deep in your heart, while you’re doing that. They have ways of making you feel as if the ideas they’ve given you were yours in the first place; as if cutting that speech from act two came to you in a dream, not in a conversation with your dramaturg. And it’s invaluable.

So many people worry about what happens when there’s conflict between a playwright and a director about a line, and I have only one piece of advice to give on that subject: get over it. There is always going to be conflict. Tons of it. They’re going to be right about some things, and you’re going to be right about some things, and you’re going to make bad decisions some of the time—making a change you shouldn’t have and NOT making a change you should have. That’s the nature of the game, so you’d better accommodate yourself to conflict. (If you can’t deal with conflict, I should add, why are you a playwright?)

What you should NOT do, however, is default to a combative position. Embracing conflict *too* passionately turns you into the sort of boor that no one wants to work with ever again. Listen to your director; listen to your dramaturg; listen to your actors; listen to your designers; listen to your producer; and listen to the theater’s artistic director, too. If you don’t like what they’re telling you, ponder it for at least two minutes before you respond. If what they’re saying makes you feel like screaming, take two hours; there’s a good chance you aren’t hearing whoever is talking.

Ultimately, the work that ends up on stage is, of necessity, the result of many minds at work, not just your own… and that’s the final truth about collaboration that you might as well get used to. You don’t get to choose everything… and thank goodness for that. If you did, there’d be no surprises, no discovery, nothing to learn. And what good would that be?