On March 28, 1997, I sat down at my desk and wrote a one act play. It wasn’t the first play I wrote exactly, but it was the first one to look and feel like a play. Although it might have been 12-16 typed-out pages (and not in manuscript format—what was that?), it understood something about theatrical time, it had some jokes that landed, and it had a melodramatic plot which made zero sense. I wrote it probably in a four- or five-hour heated rush. It was magical to wake up the next morning with this new thing saved on the computer that had not been there previous.
I’ve always remembered the date I became a playwright and, since this is my 26th year writing the darned things (about fifty of which I’ve completed), I thought I could look back now with some utility to see if there is something I’ve learned from the practice of sitting at a table and writing a play. What I’ve taken away from the whole thing is the table itself, for I realized a long time ago that a well-wrought table is a very good metaphor for a play.
Any playwright worth their salt has paid attention to the word “playwright.” “Wright” is related to the shipwright, the wheelwright, the cartwright. We are makers of plays rather than writers of them. Playwriting is anything but spilling your emotions on the page. Plays are wrought from you.
We do not expect a lot from a table in our life. As a college student in a dormitory, you are lucky to have one. As a person with no money and a first home, the table that was already there or one passed on from a family member will suffice. However, if you are an adult (and are presumably picky about your tables), there are a few things you should expect.
You can expect your table, at the very least, to be made of firm, attractive wood and for it to be stable. The stable table prevents food spillage and is there to serve the purpose of elevating the food from the floor, allowing you to comfortably sit while you eat. We take tables for granted, but we expect them to be well-made.
A play is a well-designed, well-crafted, four-legged table. The four legs of which are 1) Character, 2) Plot, 3) Action, and 4) Dialogue. The tabletop is the premise. The nails that hold this table together is Theme.
This table can be made of oak, gopher wood, pine, or balsa wood. This is to say that, when you create your play, it doesn’t have to follow a formula; it doesn’t matter what kind of wood you use if you do a good job of keeping the table level, standing, and performing its function. William Shakespeare’s plays may be fine oak. Samuel Beckett’s, rough cordwood.
So, here are a few bullet-points I’ve learned about each element that makes up our “table.”
Character
*If one begins with character, it is possible they have set themselves up for potential failure. We have often seen the folly of the playwright who allows vivid characters to take over the script to the extent that other elements are allowed to warp. See Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana. Nodding to Luigi Pirandello, those are characters in search not of an author, but a story.
*Characters do not exist. They are part extension (of yourself) and part invention.
*The over-concentration on a character in the process of writing a play is a lot like only using eggs to bake a cake. Neglect the flour, etc. and you lose the real ingredients that provide the consistency.
*If the dramatist creates characters for which we sincerely feel, they have completed a good part of the full illusion (just not all).
*Characters do not exist outside of the plays for which they are created. It is amusing and can be exciting to create the background stories for each character one invents—to imagine their father, their Christening, and their “first time.” But, to fashion oneself toward the over-construction of character is to waste a lot of time that could be spent writing more plays.
*If a character is honest (or, better yet, dishonest), if they do not deny their humanity (or if they deny it vehemently), if they are African American, Caucasian, female, male, or cross-eyed, they can have resonance with all of us. Even a complete concoction—such as Pozzo in Waiting for Godot—can have resonance. If a bad character is created by a playwright, it would have to be because they have tried to do so. We are all human. We have never been anything else. If a character does not have resonance to humanity, the playwright has been denying humanity.
Plot
*Plot can be anything. It can be a progressive series of events that occur linearly (as in most of Shakespeare’s plays) or it can be a retrogressive unraveling of events that occurred previously (as in Henrik Ibsen’s). It can be connected to the structure of music as in August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. It can be repetitive as in Beckett’s Godot. It can go anywhere and nowhere. And it does not have to be the Inciting Incident-Rising Action-Climax-Denouement contraption that we are all taught in high school.
*It is important to note how connected structure and plotting are, yet they are not always the same thing. The structure of a play consists of the many elements in their working order. Presumably (and hopefully), a play’s structure should not work without all its parts. The plot is the schematic process of the events of the play. In the end, one may not even be conscious of the difference structure and plot take in the play one writes, but if the playwright is conscious of the piece itself (and they shouldn’t write it if they’re not), the structure may even reveal itself to them after a first draft. From that point, they could simply rewrite with the notion that they always knew that was the structure. After all, no one else must know.
*All great drama is about exposing lies. In a way, the plot can write itself—tell the lies, believe the lies, confront the lies, expunge the lies. Look at Oedipus Tyrranos.
Action
*The most misunderstood and elusive aspect of playwriting is action. But it can be understood if one remembers this maxim: Without action, a character is only a figment of your imagination with a name.
*Novels and epic poems can have dialogue, characters, theme, story, plot, structure, etc. The action of such characters, however, can be given, understood, or explained. Thornton Wilder set up the difference in this way: “The novel is a past reported in the present. On the stage it is always now. This confers upon the action an increased vitality which the novelist longs in vain to incorporate into his work.”
*Action is something the character is capable of when the stakes are high and the only thing in the way is everything important to them.
*Characters for the theatre cannot be created successfully if they do not hold potential for change. Human beings have the potential for change, but we often wait on Fate or God or politics to somehow cure everything so our potential cannot ever be exerted/realized because we are afraid to fail. Drama has a responsibility to imagine characters having this potential and are willing to act upon principle or, at the very least, to act when all other options have been exhausted.
*We do not have to move in this life. Rather, we do not have to analyze our movement. After we have settled into what becomes our lives—jobs, relationships, etc.—we might only work to make it very safely into the grave without embarrassing ourselves. Such characters do not belong in plays unless this action of trying not to rock the boat can manifest itself into conflict.
*Our potential desire/ability to move and how that is tied up in our over-thinking brains, is part of what separates us from other living creatures. We are not born into nature, but into formed civilizations. We discover our nature rather late, and instincts are impeded upon by the enculturation of societal norms. The dramatist, once they recall their nature, must fight this. And it is enough reason to continue to hone our sense of action as we craft plays.
Dialogue
*The young playwright, the beginning playwright, the adolescent composing their first sketches of juvenilia will undoubtedly fall under the misconception that a play is all about dialogue. They will try to come up with witty phrases in their dialogue that try to explain a situation. If they do not begin to pay attention to how plays work, they may sink into the delusion that such drivel as witty dialogue alone is playwriting.
*If the way Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill wrote dialogue is not always as languid and “pretty” as the way Shakespeare wrote it, the important thing to remember is that their lines do serve a purpose (and that’s the goal). After all, sometimes a car will still start even if there is a delay owing to a small technical problem. That is not to say that one should not try to create dialogue that also achieves some beauty. But a play that is structurally sound with clunky words is better than one built on a foundation of sand with lines that make you weep. If you were to cry at such lines, it would only be because of their beauty, not because of their meaning.
*Aesthetic beauty is not what should come from dialogue. What one may instead wish for is dialogue that is playable to the actor. If the dialogue is playable, the actor enjoys the challenges of finding the way to fully express the words.
*No one can be taught what playable dialogue is or how you can discover it. It is best learned by active listening to the words in the mouths of actors—either at informal or formal readings or in performance. In the theater itself they will learn how the words echo from the stage to the audience. The playwright who does not familiarize themselves with the job and responsibility of acting will not go far in their search for writing better dialogue.
*Playability is not the only issue. The dialogue can be playable without being truly good. If dialogue does not further the action of the play, it is useless.
*Dialogue should reveal information about the character that can and cannot be played.
*Dialogue is not something to stress over. The language your characters use will be dependent on who those characters are and in what situations. The language will also change once an actor in rehearsal proves or disproves the playability of your lines. After these principles are in place, it can be used as a sounding-board for the larger themes being broken down in the piece. But, if this is a usage, it should never be allowed to speak for the author, but for the character. Plays are not your sermons, and they should never be used as such.
Theme/Premise
*The theme of the play should connect everything else in the play together. In this regard, it dictates structure to an extent. A premise, as Lajos Egri reminded us, is an action-oriented thumb nail sketch of a play.
*Think of the play as our bodies in a genetic sense. The theme is the DNA. When one develops as a dramatist, the theme is with you generally from your first premonition of a play. If the playwright is new, they may be able to write even full-length scripts which are not germane to a single thematic thread.
*In the beginning, the theme should be with the premise, the premise with the theme. If the writer is willing to be aware and awake, they can begin to devise the full arc of the play from these two notions. All that is left is the application of these materials in terms of character, plot, action, and dialogue.
Conclusion
Why would anyone want to write a play? It is a legitimate enough question, but easier to ask than answer. The economics are grim and that may be reason enough to question. The truth is that if one is incomplete unless they engage in the act of writing plays then they ought not be doing it—and they probably wouldn’t ask a question like that in the first place. But, in case you have queried so, let me attempt to locate the answer.
Drama inevitably pulls certain people to it like nails to a magnet. Those who become accomplished dramatists often have an interest in the spoken word and not the written one. For example, Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood can be a striking evening of theatre and a marvelous work of poetry. But it isn’t a play. While Thomas might have been actively engaged in how the listener takes in a word rather than how they peer at it from above the page’s texture, he was not as interested in the event of a theatre story as are other dramatists.
One must understand playwrights are grateful and proud when they acknowledge they have written something pretty, but unless it is woven into the fabric of an action-driven, character-infused drama, the playwright will do without it. Some highly acclaimed playwrights simply do not enjoy the act of proofreading manuscripts of their work when it goes into publication. While this quirk should be avoided (since the printed script is proof of the notion that the dramatist truly leaves something behind that will outlast them—and all writers write to be immortal), it does makes sense because the way a word appears on the page is not really what a playwright is after.
Also, the dramatist is formally interested in conflict and human relationships. This does not mean that the playwright craves conflict in their daily personal lives. In fact, the playwright should seek out the most sober, calm life they can (their plays will be better for it). But a character one creates is only as good as the journey they venture on—including the hills and valleys of that trail.
If one has been called to the drama, they have been called to one of the oldest, most elemental acts of the human being’s attempt at understanding this thing called life. Interviewed for Eugene O’Neill: A Documentary Film, the critic and author Edward L. Shaughnessy reminded us:
“These are the age-old questions of the theater itself: Who am I? And where do I come from? And what is my part in—do I have a part in—my own fate? Or am I simply a checker on the board being moved around? Do I belong to anything? To anyone? To whom do I belong now? To God, who seems to be abandoning me?”
If these questions do not fuel your interest, then you might not be a playwright.
Finally, you must remember, at various times in history, playwrights have been warriors (as was Aeschylus), priests (as was Sophokles), philosophers (as were Schiller, Camus, and Sartre), and leaders of nations (as was Havel). They began as choreographers, singers, and dancers (as in Athenian tragedy) and eventually became movers and shakers in world literature (as in the time of Shaw and Beckett). The subjects to which playwrights have always aspired have been those of the Cosmos; the functions in which they have operated and still operate were/are imperative. One should not don the shoes of such great people lightly. I merely wear the slippers, but I'm going to keep trudging onward.
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