A class I've always wanted to teach would be one called “Plays We Like.” It would consist of smart playwrights talking about the plays they've always cherished. We'd read the plays, discuss them, and I think we'd find that these great plays have a lot in common.
That's what this book is about. Finding the tools, methods and strategies held in common by plays we like, plays that work, plays that delight and move us. Finding the common threads and the constant factors in plays that appear, at face value, to be completely dissimilar. What is the common structural thread that connects Hamlet to The Odd Couple? What is the constant character factor in both Hedda Gabler and Richard III? What similar playwriting twist is found in both The Front Page and Hedda Gabler?
Well?
If I told you in the introduction, you wouldn't be compelled to read on.
And I wouldn't be a dramatist.
CHAPTER ONE
Drama and Theater
Before you begin to write a play, it's important to understand the medium for which you are writing and how it differs from other narrative forms, such as fiction and film. For all their similarities (character, story, etc.), plays, novels and films have divergent histories with various traditions and conventions, requiring unique talents of a writer. The essential formal distinction is this: Novelists write for the page; motion picture writers write for the screen; and playwrights write for the stage—a three-dimensional space encompassing live action performed by human beings. Writing for the stage demands an understanding of two fundamentals: the essence of drama and the nature of theater. In this chapter we'll define these terms and show the ways writers utilize drama and theater to create effective stage plays.
DRAMA AND STORY
The terms drama and theater are not interchangeable. Drama consists of characters in conflict and in action. Theater is both the arena for the action and the sensory experience of that action. Let's look at the definition of the word drama. It comes from the Greek dran, to do. To act. An action. In his Poetics, Aristotle defined drama as “an imitation of an action.” Drama—written drama, performed drama—is the reproduction of people performing actions. People doing.
In drama, the actions of the play must cling together to form a story, one action causing another, adding up to some meaningful point that touches the thoughts and emotions of the audience. Good drama has an ordered narrative, often referred to as a plot, and plot can best be defined as the arrangement of actions that take place in a play. These plotted actions accumulate to tell the story in an arranged sequence. The plot of your play starts at the very last possible moment. The plot must begin near the entrance ramp of the greatest problem and the most exciting journey of your character's life. In your play, the characters must face their greatest test, their toughest battle. Why would you show the audience your character's second- or third-best story? Shakespeare showed us Hamlet's crisis involving the murder of his father, not his school difficulties at Wittenburg. Sophocles focused on the nightmarish day of Oedipus' downfall, not on the comparatively pleasant day he got married. Felix Unger and Oscar Madison did lots of things together, but in his comedy The Odd Couple, Neil Simon showed them living together, not going to a movie when they were still married to their wives. Your play tells your character's most interesting story. And the plot is taking place in present tense, right in front of us.
Is there a difference between story and plot? The scholar G.B. Tennyson, in An Introduction to Drama, recalls the British novelist E.M. Forster's distinction between story and plot: “ ‘The king died of grief and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The King died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” (My italics.) As Tennyson points out, plot—planned, designed and executed by the playwright—utilizes the notion of cause and effect to shape and arrange events to tell a story.
Stories are humanity's way of understanding our lives and the world in which we live. When we try to comprehend an event—a marriage, a divorce, a war, a crime, the life and death of a human being or the rise and fall of a civilization—we tend to investigate and explain the events in terms of story. We ask the basic question: What happened? Then we ask: Why? Then we ask: What happens next?
Human beings ask questions every moment of the day, questions about the world, about people, about ideas. Life moves forward, and as it does we are constantly presented with one simple but resounding question: What are you going to do next? The stakes can be small or large: Should you cook dinner or go to a restaurant? Should your nation attack an enemy or seek a peace? And when we report on our lives—our questions, actions, decisions and answers—we see the events in a time sequence. “This happened,” we say, “then that happened.” And we see the actions in a causal chain that takes place in a linear movement through time.
An obvious example of linear, cause-and-effect dramatic action can be found in Hamlet. King Hamlet is dead long before the play starts. The play begins with the scene between the soldiers on the battlement. Then the ghost enters. Then the soldiers tell Prince Hamlet about the ghost. Then Hamlet meets the ghost of his father and learns about the king's murder by his uncle Claudius. This then causes Hamlet to vow revenge and scheme to catch his uncle. Then Hamlet runs rings around the opposing forces, including Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the players arrive, causing Hamlet to come up with the idea of staging the play-within-a-play, which in turn causes Claudius to reveal his guilt. Then Hamlet kills Polonius, causing Hamlet to be sent to England. Polonius' death and Hamlet's disappearance cause Ophelia to go mad, in turn causing her death. Then Hamlet returns, causing Claudius to plan Hamlet's murder with the help of Laertes. Then Hamlet duels with Laertes, causing Laertes to stab Hamlet, in turn causing Hamlet to stab Laertes, causing Laertes to confess his guilt and accuse Claudius of plotting Hamlet's death, causing Hamlet to stab Claudius. Then Hamlet dies.
The story always moves forward, each action caused by a preceding action and in turn causing yet another action to follow. The arrangement of the actions is the plot of the story.
Ninety-nine percent of all plays have stories that move forward in time. Some plays have a story that covers many years; the British director Peter Brook's epic The Mahabharata and George Bernard Shaw's political satire Back to Methuselah depict events over centuries. Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet and Lillian Hellman's family melodrama The Little Foxes take place over weeks and months. Noel Coward's comedy Hay Fever takes place over a three-day weekend. Some plays follow Aristotle's classical theory of the “unity of time,” with all the play's actions taking place within a twenty-four-hour period. Examples include Sophocles' fifth century B.C. Greek tragedy Oedipus, Moliere's seventeenth-century French comedy about religious hypocrisy Tartuffe, nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's drama about the last day in the life of a tortured, tempestuous woman Hedda Gabler, and Edward Albee's savage early sixties party-play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And some plays—I call them Time = Time Plays—cover the exact amount of time it takes to watch the play; if the action takes ninety minutes, the play runs ninety minutes. Examples include Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother about a woman who announces to her mother her intention to commit suicide; Lanford Wilson's two-character love story Talley's Folly; and German writer Franz Xavier Kroetz's searing, wordless one-character play Request Concert.
Regardless of the amount of time a story covers (minutes, hours, days, years), most playwrights organize their stories in a forward-moving fashion. True, some writers construct stories as flashback or memory plays. Peter Shaffer's psychological mystery Equus and Tennessee Williams' delicate family drama The Glass Menagerie are stories narrated by onstage characters in the present about events that took place in the past, but when the narrator steps aside to show us what happened, the play's actions are depicted in linear forward-moving progression. The “present” narration of these plays is always understood to be a framing device. The majority of the action is depicted in linear sequence.
Some
playwrights have written their plots in reverse order: Harold Pinter's love-triangle drama Betrayal and the Stephen Sondheim musical about friends and show business Merrily We Roll Along depict a sequence of events going backward in time. Betrayal, for example, begins with scenes taking place in 1977, starting with the last encounter between Emma and Jerry, the two lovers of the triangle. After this first scene we move forward to a tense encounter between Jerry and Emma's husband Robert, who is also Jerry's best friend. After which we move backward to Jerry and Emma's breakup two years before. Then we move back a year to the day Robert found out about Emma and Jerry's affair. Then we move forward about a week to a scene in which Emma finds herself unable to confess to Jerry that Robert knows. Then we move forward again to an awkward encounter between Robert and Jerry a few days later. Then we move back two years to a happier time before Jerry and Emma's affair was uncovered. By the end of the play we have reached the night Jerry first told Emma he was in love with her, an event that takes place seven years before the first scene of the play. That's the gimmick, and it's a great one.
Fewer dramatists employ a technique that depicts the often nonlinear nature of human experience and thought. We all know what it's like to have nonlinear ideas. Our thoughts, fantasies and memories may bounce around in our heads in various orders, and so some writers seek to depict that experience onstage. The plays of British writer Caryl Churchill, such as Top Girls and Cloud Nine, attempt this, as do those of the American playwrights Mac Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks and Craig Lucas, among others. Events in a character's life may be remembered, fantasized and depicted onstage in a nonlinear fashion (A nonlinear sequence: First I remember my college graduation, next I fantasize about my high school graduation, last I imagine my own death), but these nonlinear scenes are used sparingly in theater. A playwright who writes an entire play in this manner can easily provoke confusion and boredom in his audience. Theater audiences may be entranced by stage depictions of nonlinear experience from time to time, but the shrewd playwright does not write an entire drama this way. The rule of thumb for nonlinear writing: A little goes a long way.
Experimenting with time structure can be liberating for the writer and entertaining for the audience. The audience may enjoy the “trick” of a nonlinear structure, but the primary questions they're asking are not structural ones but rather human ones: Where have the characters been? What are they doing? What are they going to do? What audiences crave in drama is an understanding of people and ideas through the forward-moving connection of incidents. David Ball, in his book for actors, directors, designers and writers, Backwards and Forwards, underlines this notion when he argues that a successful play may be read “backwards” action-by-action to see exactly how each action was affected by a previous one. This is a wonderful way to analyze a text.
The nature of a dramatic story lies in its linkage of one event or action to another. Sometimes the detailed events depicted do not, at first glance, seem to connect. A murder mystery, for example, might include an ostensibly extraneous scene that appears to have no bearing on the main plot, but in the end we realize it actually had great importance. In a good story, in good drama, everything connects. And in good drama, the connected actions are ones intentionally performed by strong characters.
Drama does not examine human beings in repose, at leisure. While many good plays often depict moments of joy, relaxation, even boredom, the majority of any drama has little to do with inactivity. Drama examines human beings in extremes. Under pressure. In trouble. Within conflict.
Good drama allows for some random acts to affect action. Weather, illness and accidental outside forces often change fictional events, just as they often change real ones. Hamlet was saved by a chance encounter with pirates after all, and in Hedda Gabler a character happens to find a precious manuscript in a gutter. But a shrewd playwright doesn't depend too much on coincidence. It's fine to allow your desperate hero to be held up in a rainy traffic jam once, or even upon arriving at his destination discover that his prey has just eluded him, but a play filled with traffic jams, last minute arrivals and sudden rainstorms suggests a world governed less by the actions of people and more by the accidents that befall people. And audiences go to the theater to see people act, not to see puppets be manipulated by cloudbursts.
In its highest sense, drama makes powerful statements about the human condition. It reveals truths about our world and ourselves, truths that rise out of characters acting under the pressure of conflict, need and desire. Remember the old saying: “If you want to find out what a person is made of, put that person under pressure.” Good playwrights remember another old saying: “Always keep your hero in trouble.” Putting a character under pressure and keeping that character in trouble will assure two things: that the audience will find out what the character is made of, and that the story will move forward.
In successful drama, conflict is incited, is developed via action and complications to a crisis, results in a climax, and comes to its resolution. So, for our purposes, let us redefine drama as: (1) People doing things, performing acts, to affect other people and cause other actions. (2) A conflict of people, ideas and wills that must result in a Resolution of the Conflict. (3) A contest between opposing forces. (4) Imitated actions that tell a story.
REAL-LIFE DRAMA, MYSTERIES AND DRAMATIC QUESTIONS
Is drama only found in theater? No. Drama can be found in film, on television, in fiction. Most important, drama can be found in real life. What is dramatic in real life? A war. An election. A divorce. A trial. A murder case. A courtship. An illness. A business deal. A love affair. In these examples, the drama is inherent to the situation. The opposing forces are obvious. The conflict is obvious. The dramatic questions are obvious. What isn't obvious are the answers.
One of my firm beliefs is that all plays are mystery plays. By “mystery play,” I don't necessarily mean crime/murder mysteries such as Agatha Christie's whodunit The Mousetrap or Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth or Ira Levin's Deathtrap. Nor do I mean the religious “mystery plays” of the medieval period. What I mean is that all good drama is carried by mystery, by the questions posed in a play. Think of these questions as little hooks to pull the audience along. The audience leans forward to find out the answers to these questions. Even a casual look at many great plays, including Oedipus, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler—even Neil Simon's comedy The Odd Couple—reveals a large number of mysteries posed by the playwright throughout the script; questions about riddles and parentage (Oedipus), murders and marriage (Hamlet), manuscripts (Hedda Gabler), and why someone is late for a poker game (The Odd Couple). The answers to these and other questions are dramatically revealed over the course of each play. In this sense, all great dramas are great mystery plays.
In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, we ask: Who will be killed next on Indian Island? Will anyone survive? And who is the killer? In Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page we ask: Will the tough editor Walter Burns get his star reporter Hildy Johnson back on the paper? Will someone discover the killer hiding in the rolltop desk? In Lorraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun we ask: Will Walter Lee get his family to sell their house and move away to a better life? In each of these examples, certain key questions are posed by the predominant dramatic situation. These key questions can be seen as the dramatic spine of the play. A well-constructed play usually has one central dramatic question, a question mat suggests a conflict of opposing forces. Examples: Which side will win the war? Which candidate will win the election? Will the jury return a guilty verdict against the accused?
But a play that is truly dramatic—especially a full-length (sixty-five minutes to three hours)—needs more than one question to keep the audience interested, engaged and involved. So sub-questions, inner-questions, side-questions, thematic-questions must be posed. Take our real-life dramas—the war, the election and the courtroom trial. What sub-questions can join the major one?
In our war play: Will a third army join forces to win a battle
? Will the general be replaced? Will the weather aid the attackers? Will the spy reveal the troop movements? Will the infantryman find his courage? Will the captain lose the love of his fiancée? Will the diplomats arrive at an agreement before the assault? Will there ever be an end to war?
In our election play: Will the candidate use incriminating photos to smear his rival? Will his wife leave him? Will the campaign manager unify his staff? What was in the letter we saw the rival candidate read, then burn? Will a headline story change the nature of the political debate? Will it rain on election day? Is a democratic election the best way to instate men in power?
In our courtroom play: Will the accused tell the truth? Will the prosecutor use the phony evidence? Will the defense attorney stop drinking? Who is the mysterious woman who keeps lurking in the back of the courtroom? Will the corrupt judge rule in favor of the accused? Is Law the equal of Justice?
The critic and scholar Martin Esslin, in his book An Anatomy of Drama, describes these series of mysteries, these series of questions as “arcs,” much like the arcs of a suspension bridge that keep the structure standing. Says Esslin: “Put in its simplest and most mundane terms, the basic task of anyone concerned with presenting any kind of drama to any audience consists in capturing their attention and holding it as long as required. Only when that fundamental objective has been achieved can the more lofty and ambitious intentions be fulfilled: the imparting of wisdom and insight, illumination and purging of emotion.”
The Art and Craft of Playwriting Page 2