A Teacher Resource Guide

• Introduction
• Core Curriculum Standards
• Plot Description
• Character Profiles
• Glossary of Terms

• Faces of Fiction
• Steven Dietz Biography
• Talking with Steven Dietz

• What is a Writer's Colony
• Famous Diaries
• Success for Writers
• Fifteen Craft Exercises for Writers
• Related Materials

• Pre-Show Questions
• After the Show
• Enhance the Performance

Linda and Michael, successful writers who happen to be married to each other, thrive on the give-and-take of their unusually honest relationship. But when they decide to share their diaries, the boundaries between past and present, fact and fiction, trust and betrayal begin to break down. No life, it turns out, is an open book. This production, directed by David Warren features McCarter veterans Laila Robbins (Fool for Love) and Robert Cucciolli (The School for Scandal).

Fiction is the lastest work from award-winning playwright Steven Dietz, one of the country's most prolific, versatile, and widely produced playwrights. Over twenty of his plays, from the arresting docudrama God's Country and the metaphorical masterpiece Lonely Planet to the romantic comedy of suspicion Private Eyes, have been performed throughout the United States, Off-Broadway, and produced worldwide to critical acclaim.

Dietz is the master of the perception shift, in each of his works there is an unexpected twist or series of twists that alter the perceptions of the characters and of the audience. In Fiction those perception shifts abound causing characters not only to doubt each other but also themselves. Through the use of the journals of the characters, Dietz challenges the power of memory and its ability to reshape the events of our lives. Because much of Fiction is addressed to the audience from these journals, the audience must decide whether or not to believe the accounts of the past as the narrators describe them. This tension between trust and suspicion, between fact and fiction, is at the heart of this gripping drama.

Within the pages of this guide, you and your students will find information that puts the play in context as well as a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the artists that have brought this new play to life. Each piece of material has been carefully selected to help enrich your theater experience and engage your students' interests in every aspect of this theatrical journey.

The Visual and Performing Arts are considered Core Curriculum areas for the New Jersey State Department of Education. This production of Fiction is designed to give your students exposure to the specific Core Curriculum Standards listed below.

Fiction and Curriculum Standards

This production of Fiction and related study materials will provide students with specific knowledge and skills to address the following Core Curriculum Content Standards in the Arts:

Fiction is also designed to address the following Core Curriculum Standards in Language Arts Literacy:

Michael and Linda Waterman have been married for twenty years. Michael is a successful author whose books have been made into blockbuster films. Linda is a professor of writing whose first book, At The Cape, earned her nationwide critical acclaim. Together, they form a feisty partnership that thrives on intellectual banter and subtle competition. All works well in the world of the Watermans until Linda is unexpectedly diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The doctors give her only three weeks to live.

Faced with this news, Linda offers Michael her diaries as a dying gift, asking him to read them after she is dead. In return, she asks Michael if she may read his. Although her dying wish makes Michael uncomfortable, he cannot deny her.

In the comfort of their home, Linda begins to pore over the pages of her husband's journals, urging Michael to stay away until she has finished. What she finds to her dismay are the details of an affair Michael had with a woman named Abby whom he met while in residence at The Drake Colony, a writer's retreat at which both Linda and Michael had separately stayed. Michael's apologies mean little to Linda, who admits she had been prepared to forgive him the indulgence of the affair until she read that Abby was in his life for years after their initial meeting.

Linda and Michael spend the next weeks trying to deal with the damage that has been done between them. Meanwhile, news comes back indicating that the doctors were wrong about Linda's condition. Though she will still have to undergo radiation therapy, the original diagnosis has been amended and Linda has been given her life back. Abby Drake arrives at their home to say her goodbyes to Linda, only to learn that Linda's diagnosis has changed. Abby's appearance opens the wounds of the affair, and Michael confesses to Linda that he and Abby met once afterwards in Paris. What Linda is never to learn is that the stories written in Michael's journal throughout the years were not truths, but fiction. Linda remembers Abby from her own days at the Drake and the three spend the evening together. Before Abby leaves, the two resolve the unfinished secrets of their past.

Shortly after Abby's visit, Linda dies, leaving Michael with her diaries. Reading them, he finds that his wife had secrets of her own.

2001 Inventing van Gogh, Arizona Theatre Company
2000 Paragon Springs (based on Ibsen's Enemy of the People) Milwaukee Repertory Theatre
1999 Force of Nature (based on Goethe's Elective Affinities) Milwaukee Repertory Theatre
1998 Rocket Man, Arizona Theatre Company
1997 Still Life with Iris, Seattle Children's Theatre
1997 Private Eyes, Arizona Theatre Company
1996 The Nina Variations, Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Shepherdstown, WV
1995 Dracula, Arizona Theatre Company
1995 Silence (adapted from Shusaku Endo), Institute of Dramatic Arts, Tokyo/Milwaukee Repertory Theatre
1994 The Rememberer (based on a memoir by Joyce Simmons Cheeka), Seattle Children's Theatre
1994 Handing Down the Names, ACT Theatre
1993 Lonely Planet, Northlight Theatre, Chicago
1991 Halcyon Days, ACT Theatre
1991 Trust, ACT Theatre
1988 God's Country, ACT Theatre
1987 Ten November, Wisdom Bridge, Chicago
1987 Foolin' Around With Infinity, Los Angeles Theatre Center
1986 Painting It Red, Quicksilver Stage, Minneapolis
1986 More Fun Than Bowling, Actor's Theatre of St. Paul

Truth or Dare: Steven Dietz and the Facts on Fiction

By Liz Engelman

Tokyo. London. Buenos Aires. Montreal. It reads like a shop window at Prada, but it's actually a list of some of the cities where Steven Dietz has seen his plays produced. For over two decades, his work has been enjoyed and admired in perhaps more theaters across the country than any other contemporary playwright. His delicious comedy of deception, Private Eyes, was one of the 10 most produced plays in the American theater in 1998; his 1988 docudrama God's Country, depicting the white supremacist movement, received over 100 productions in the United States as well as performances in Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa. Other notable plays, including the award-winning Lonely Planet, Rocket Man, Still Life with Iris, and Inventing Van Gogh, have been produced at over 80 regional theaters, and with the world premiere of Fiction, McCarter joins their ranks. Whether he's writing about marriages, friendship or business practices, Dietz has proven himself a master at investigating the dishonesty in the most intimate of relationships. It would be a crime to divulge too much of Fiction, which begins with a married couple, both writers, deciding to share their journals with each other. If, as he says of these two characters, "the lies begin when you lift the pen," suffice it to say that Dietz reveals the fictions that lie beneath the facts. With that in mind, you may want to approach the following interview with a healthy dose of skepticism.

LE: How did you first get started in the theater?
SD: Right after college, as a director at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. (Back when playwrights typed their plays onto carbon paper and we ran off mimeographed copies for the actors. A time shortly after the Civil War.) I was fortunate enough to direct workshops and readings of early plays by "up and coming writers" like August Wilson, Lee Blessing, John Olive, etc. It was a godsend.

LE: What is it about the theater that draws you to it, and keeps you there?
SD: It brings people together. It puts a roomful of strangers in proximate contact with a story. In that way, in this digital age, it can function as something both compelling and radical. Have you heard the sound of the hushed room at that amazing moment when the lights first go down - the play looming as an imminent adventure. In that brief hush is the secret we're after, I think.

LE: Your body of work covers a range of subjects and styles. For all its versatility, is there something uniquely "Dietzian" that you would say runs through all your work? Or do you leave that to the critics?
SD: I seem to have an awful lot of plays about memory and identity. (I know this because an earnest grad student sent me a paper which made the point in detail.) It may be because these are the issues that the live art form of the theater tackles particularly well. It may be because I simply keep writing about the same damn things over and over again. Let's not go there, okay? Either way, we push on.

LE: What was your original impulse for writing FICTION?
SD: The notion that the only thing harder than dying with a secret would be living with one.

LE: What triggers your process to sit down and write a new play?
SD: Someone like Liz Engelman calls me and asks me if that new play I promised her is done yet. Like most writers, I say: "Yes." And then I hang up and boot up and type like mad.

LE: For many writers, "rewrite" is a dirty word. Not only are you an avid writer, you are an avid re-writer. Do you enjoy the rewriting process?
SD: I love it. It is the fundamental aspect of our craft. The initial burst of writing is a sweet and deceptive gift; the rewriting makes it a play. Nothing is more rewarding than to cut or rewrite well; nothing is harder to master; nothing the writer will do from Moment One will have a greater impact on his/her audience. Rewriting is the writer's best friend: it means you don't have to get it right all at once. Dribs and drabs. Little by little. It also means you can pull the weeds up by the roots before the neighbors see them. (This is much better than the other writing strategy - backing away, growing defensive, folding one's arms, and convincing the neighbors that no, really, those are flowers.) Also (if I may): In the course of 20-plus years as a working playwright I have seen a lot of writers get produced and celebrated for their work. And then I have watched a great many of them vanish from the scene. To my mind what distinguishes the writers with "staying power"- those who are able to make a career, a body of work - is their ability to rewrite. Period. To be a tough and productive critic of every single sentence you write; every single story you conjure. That's your job. And you can't cheat - you'll get caught. Maybe not at first, but in time you will.

LE: Your plays have been produced at over 80 theaters regionally, as well as overseas, without ever having major productions in New York. It is rare that a writer has had so much national acclaim without the "help" of a New York hit. How have you been able to build and maintain such a prolific career?
SD: This is my life's work and I'm too stubborn to stop. I've been very fortunate. Many regional theaters have made ongoing commitments to my work (and I don't mean just a season or two, I mean 10, 12, 15 years - god love 'em) and the majority of those plays have found homes elsewhere. Those commitments - knowing that there are sympathetic readers of your work out there - those things force me to be prolific. I don't want to waste this window of time, this rare chance to tell the stories that intrigue me. In some way, I suppose, I've been fortunate enough to invert the famous adage: I've made a living in the theater and never made a killing.

Whether tucked comfortably in serene forests or perched delicately on seashores, retreats and colonies have provided artists with an opportunity to escape from the distractions of the world for nearly 100 years. Poets, novelists, painters, and more recently, playwrights look to nature for inspiration as illustrated by Steven Dietz's characters in Fiction.

Artists at the salon at the MacDowell Colony

The Drake Colony of Dietz's Fiction would most likely consist of a few dozen artists' studios spread out over acres of wooded grounds. As with the well-known MacDowell Colony, the studios at the Drake Colony would be secluded from one another, offering the writers the utmost peace and privacy. Each studio would be comfortably but not elaborately decorated, including the basic comforts of electricity and heat, but without the distractions of telephones or fax machines. There would also be communal spaces such as dining halls and recreation rooms, which the artists might use at any time during their stay. Typically colonies deny access to guests without specific arrangement or invitation to ensure that the artists in residence remain free of distraction. Artists will often commune with each other at meal times, and often the colonies arrange for viewings, readings and/or showings of artwork in the evenings after dinner. Aside from these interactions, the artists are generally in a solitary environment. Artists come and go from residences such as The Drake Colony with an average stay lasting about 4 weeks. Most colonies have a maximum stay of two months.

Michael and Linda Waterman are not the only writers who kept journals of their personal lives. Throughout history many writers, historians and artists have had their private diaries published either during their lives or after their deaths. The following are some of the most famous of these diaries.

• Leonardo da Vinci devoted 30 years to illuminating artistic and engineering concepts in his notebooks.

• Lewis and Clark recorded their exploration of North America from 1803-1806.

• Charles Darwin observed nature's mysteries before forming his "Theory of Evolution."

• Louisa May Alcott requested that her life-long journal be destroyed - it was not.

• Edgar Degas sketched in his journal to work through his thoughts.

• Queen Victoria confided in her diary from the age of 13 until only a few days before her death.

• Leon Trotsky's framed his view of the Russian Revolution.

• Vaslav Nijinsky turned to compulsive journal writing days before entering an institution.

• Albert Speer, Hitler's master architect, revealed the secrets of the Nazis.

• Richard Nixon maintained an audio presidential diary that later came back to bite him.

• Joan Crawford chronicled her glamorous and painful life.

What does it mean to be a great writer? How does a writer measure his or her own success? Throughout Fiction novelists Michael and Linda continually assess their own and each other's abilities with regards to two different kinds of acceptance - commercial and critical. The following are brief biographies of a few of the great writers referred to in Fiction. The lives of these writers shed some insight to the goals and struggles of Fiction's main characters.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

Tom Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and graduated from Washington and Lee University. He received his doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Mr. Wolfe worked as a reporter for the Springfield Union, The Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune. His writing has also appeared in New York magazine, Esquire, and Harper's.

In 1965 The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and in 1968 The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test were published simultaneously. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was published in 1970.

In 1975, The Painted Word, an incandescent, hilarious look at the world of modern art, caused as much controversy as anything Mr. Wolfe has written. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, a collection of essays, was published in 1976.

The Right Stuff, a national bestseller published in 1979, won the American Book Award for general nonfiction. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters named Mr. Wolfe as recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for distinguished service in the field of journalism. From Bauhaus to Our House, his distinctive look at contemporary architecture, was published in the fall of 1981 and became another national bestseller. Mr. Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987, and went on to become one of the top ten bestselling books of the decade.

Tom Wolfe lives in New York City. On November 6,1998, Wolfe published a new novel entitled A Man in Full.

Sylvia Plath was born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.

Plath's surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father (he was a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned from a stay in New York City where she had been a student "guest editor" at Mademoiselle Magazine, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963 (1966). After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Plath resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith with honors and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.

In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes, and in 1960, when she was 28, her first book, The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book show clearly the dedication with which Plath had served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Hughes settled for a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart. The hardness of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. On February 11, 1963, Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes. Poppies in July was written in July of 1962.

Anaïs Nin was born in Paris, France. The child of a Spanish father and French-Danish mother, she and her mother moved to New York City in 1914 where she attended Catholic schools. She left school when 16, worked as a model, studied dance, and returned to Europe in 1923. She investigated psychoanalysis under the tutelage of Otto Rank, and briefly practiced the discipline under his supervision and on her own in New York City. In 1935 she returned to France and helped establish a publishing house, Siana Editions, because no one would publish her erotically charged works. She returned to New York City in 1939 and continued writing but it would be the 1960s before she began to be discovered by the literary world at large. She would eventually become best-known for her series of intensely personal journals begun in 1931, The Diary of Anaïs Nin (10 vols. 1966-83). She is also known for her intimate relationships with Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, among many others described in her writings. She also wrote novels, short stories, and erotica, all clearly drawing on the contents of her journals.

Writing exercises are a great way to both increase your skill as a writer and to generate new ideas. One of the great benefits of private writing exercises is that you can free yourself of fear and perfectionism. If you want to grow as a writer, don't be afraid to be imperfect. That is what practice is for. What you write for any of these exercise may not be your best work, but it is practice for when you will need to write your best work.

1. Pick ten people you know and write a one-sentence description for each of them.

2. Record five minutes of a talk radio show. Write down the dialogue and add narrative descriptions of the speakers and actions as if you were writing a scene.

3. Write a 500-word biography of your life.

4. Write your obituary. List all of your life's accomplishments. You can write it as if you died today or fifty or more years in the future.

5. Write a 300-word description of your bedroom.

6. Write a fictional interview with yourself, an acquaintance, a famous figure or a fictional character. Do it in the style of an appropriate (or inappropriate) magazine or publication such as Time, People, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen or Maxim.

7. Pick up a newspaper or supermarket tabloid. Scan the articles until you find one that interests you and use it as the basis for a scene or story.

8. Keep a diary of a fictional character.

9. Take a passage from a book, a favorite or a least favorite, and rewrite the passage in a different style such as noir, gothic romance, pulp fiction or horror story.

10. Pick an author, one you like though not necessarily your favorite, and make a list of what you like about the way they write. Do this from memory first, without rereading their work. After you've made your list, reread some of their work and see if you missed anything or if your answers change. Analyze what elements of their writing style you can add to your own, and what elements you should not or cannot add. Remember that your writing style is your own, and that you should only try to think of ways to add to your own style. Never try to mimic someone else for more than an exercise or two.

11. Take a piece of your writing that you have written in first person and rewrite it in third person, or vice-versa. You can also try this exercise changing tense, narrators, or other stylistic elements. Don't do this with an entire book. Stick to shorter works. Once you commit to a style for a book, never look back or you will spend all of your time rewriting instead of writing.

12. Try to identify your earliest childhood memory. Write down everything you can remember about it. Rewrite it as a scene. You may choose to do this from your current perspective or from the perspective you had at that age.

13. Remember an old argument you had with another person. Write about the argument from the point of view of the other person. Remember that the idea is to see the argument from their perspective, no your own. This is an exercise in voice, not in proving yourself right or wrong.

14. Write a 200-word description of a place. You can use any and all sensory descriptions but sight: you can describe what it feels like, sounds like, smells like and even tastes like. Try to write the description in such a way that people will not miss the visual details.

15. Sit in a restaurant or a crowded area and write down the snippets of conversation you hear. Listen to the people around you - how they talk and what words they use. Once you have done this, you can practice finishing their conversations. Write your version of what comes next in the conversation. Match their style.

This article was written by John Hewitt, Director of the Writer's Resource Center at
http://www.poewar.com.

Interested in learning more about Steven Dietz or about the art and craft of journalling and playwriting? The following websites, books and articles were useful in the preparation of this guide and may provide additional information about issues related to Fiction.

Websites:
www.poewar.com
www.writerswrite.com
www.absolutewrite.com
www.macdowellcolony.org
www.kennedy-center.org

Plays:
Dietz, Steven. Lonely planet. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1994.

Dietz, Steven. Private Eyes. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998.

Famous Diaries:
Dostoievsky, F.M. The Diary of a Writer. translated and annotated by Boris Brasol. New York: Octagon Books, 1973.

Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Gunther Stuhlmann ed. New York: Swallow Press 1966.

Woolf, Virgina. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Anne Olivier Bell ed. introd. by Quentin Bell. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Additional Materials:
Neubauer, Joan R. and Adams, Kathleen. Complete Idiot's Guide to Journaling. New York: Alpha Books, 2000.

1. Have your students keep private journals for a specified amount of time. At the end of the time ask the students to choose one passage from their own journals to read outloud to the class. Ask the class to make observations about what is specific to journal writing. What do we learn about the writer? How do we learn about the writer? Do we believe everything the writer has said? At the end of this exercise ask each student to make a list of all the people that he/she would allow to read his/her journal. Why are some people not on that list?

2. Expose your students to excerpts of diaries of famous writers. Discuss the difference between journal writing and novel, poetry or playwriting. Debate with your students whether they think diaries and journals are written to be read while the writer is alive, when the writer is dead, or not at all.

3. Introduce your students to the idea of a "perception shift". Use movies that model this concept such as The Shawshank Redemption and The Sixth Sense. Create a list of examples of perception shifts and have the students write individual monologues, stories or scenes that employ this technique.

1. What were the various perception shifts employed by the playwright? What were the clues that lead you away from the "truth" and what clues that supported the shift?

2. Why is the title of the play "Fiction"? Where are the various fictions that exist in the characters' lives? How do these fictions affect their lives? Is there another title that might be appropriate for this play? What and why?

3. How did the elements of set, lighting, sound and costume design support the production? Are there other ways that you could envision a design for this play?

4. Which character's perspective do you see the play through? Who is the main narrator? Did you feel that the narrator was being honest? Are narrators always honest and reliable? Why or why not?

1. Have your students research other diaries that have been published. Explore the art of journal (or diary) writing with your students and have them adapt a passage or more from the diary of a real person into a script for a stage event. What is this character like? How do we know that? Ask the students to perform the adaptations with special attention to character interpretation and the audience/performer relationship.

2. Prepare your students to do a critical analysis of Fiction with regards to acting, direction and design. Have students write reviews of the production as if they were theatre critics for a major newspaper. Encourage students to back up opinions with specific examples from the production.

3. Discuss with your students times in their lives when they have been completely surprised by a person or an event or situation. How do different people deal with the unexpected? Allow this discussion to reflect on the characters' relationships in Fiction.