The Passionate, Personal Plays of Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis has chosen to devote his life to writing plays that require years of research before setting pen to paper. Once he finally begins to write, he becomes a craftsman, choosing each word and bit of punctuation with care, often going back weeks and months later to change a period here, a comma there. Stavis is the opposite of the facile playwright who can sit down at the typewriter and hammer out a scene: he will spend days, sometimes even weeks, on a speech or a few lines of dialogue. However, this exhausting attention to detail is not ultimately what determines whether his plays work or fail. Stavis succeeds to the degree that he is able to combine an artist's passion with a watchmaker's precision, because his goal is to be both passionate and precise, to render the deepest feelings of the human soul in a meticulously crafted piece of work. He tolerates neither sloppiness nor shallowness in his work or anyone else's. Obviously, Stavis could have chosen an easier way to write. He has just six plays to show for 50 years of work (he has much other writing to his credit, including two prose works based on the research he did for his plays; an oratorio; a script for television; a novel, a novella and several poems; and many articles and scholarly papers. But, as Stavis says, "How I am regarded will stand or fall by the plays.") And his plays, especially in the last several years, have gone so against the trend of the contemporary American theater that he has had few productions in this country. He has no regrets. "How could I have done anything differently?," he asks.' "I couldn't. Because I don't know what it means to compromise with my art. I never have, I never will, and that's it. "Writing anything other than at the level I want to write bores the hell out of me. Writing is very difficult for me, so why do I want to waste my time writing junk? To go through the agony -and writing is an agony for me to go through the agony of writing. I'll only go through that level of agony for the very top, top level of my capacity." And why does he do it? "Forget about numbers of