These are elementary examples. For a more sophisticated one, let's look at King Lear. Why necessarily does Lear banish Cordelia? Cordelia stood up to him, but can't a father put his hurt feelings aside and forgive? What circumstances does Shakespeare provide to make sense of Lear's rejection of Cordelia, this infamous, irrevocable, foolish, tragic action?
• Lear is old.
• Lear is a king.
• Lear is prideful.
• Lear is a widower.
• Lear expected Cordelia to say something else (never underestimate what a character will do when flustered, when surprised).
• Lear made the announcement of the division of his kingdom in court, in public, and Cordelia's rejection of him was a public rejection, humiliating Lear.
Take one of these circumstances away, and Lear might have forgiven Cordelia. A younger Lear might have been less needy and intolerant. A Lear who was not a king would have had less to lose or give. A Lear who was not prideful would have cared less. A Lear with a wife might have listened to a wife's counsel. A Lear satisfied by Cordelia's response would have had no reason to banish her at all. And—in what I think was Shakespeare's genius stroke—a Lear who announced the division of his kingdom privately would never have been embarrassed so publicly and hence would never have needed to display his power immediately.
Take a key circumstance away, and Lear's rejection, his brutal action, doesn't make sense. Take the action away and there is no dramatic problem, no dramatic question, no potential for mystery, tension, suspense, expectation. Take all that away and you have no play.
A good plot is filled with dozens of actions, performed by characters with wants and needs. Their actions create further actions as the characters attempt to overcome the obstacles placed in their way. All these actions must be moving in the same direction. There is usually one main plot, one major dramatic question. There may be subplots—lesser questions and actions performed by the main characters and the minor characters—but they are all vehicles moving toward the same destination. They may take different routes at different speeds, but the point of arrival is always the same.
EXERCISES
1. Using the two characters you sketched in the previous exercises, and including both the goal the protagonist desired and the obstacle the antagonist supplied, decide which of the two combatants wins the conflict. Now write down the story of this conflict in no more than three pages. Write it down as a short story or synopsis. Write down what happened before the conflict took place, write down what happened in the scene of the conflict itself, and write down what happened in its aftermath.
2. Now write the story again, but this time trim the story to its essential actions. What parts of the story are necessary? What parts are not? Start the plot as late into the story as possible. Remember: The plot of Hamlet starts long after the murder of the king, but very soon before Hamlet is set on his quest for revenge.
3. Now write the pared-down version of the story along the lines of the “strip tease.” Initial Interest; followed by a Development of Attraction; followed by an Involvement With the Subject; a Goal, a Pursuit, Obstacles to Overcome, Suspense and Tension; finally Success and Satisfaction. If you can, great. If you can't, rework the plot until it follows this “strip tease” form.
4. What choices did you make available to your characters? Did the characters choose plausible actions? What guided their choices? What were their personal qualities, attributes and flaws? What were their strengths and weaknesses? Would their choices be interesting to an audience in a dramatic sense? List the characters' qualities on paper. List the options. List the choices. Do they connect? Do they seem plausible? Are they interesting? If so, great. If not, revise.
5. Using our King Lear example, list the circumstances you created to facilitate maximum conflict, tension and action. Could the circumstances and the actions lead to further dramatic actions? List the potential further actions.
IDEAS
When Aristotle wrote about a play's idea, he was referring to what we now more often call “theme,” the abstract issues and feelings that grow out of the dramatic action. In her book A Room of One's Own, the novelist Virginia Woolf called this the “nugget”—something of value a person takes home from an artistic experience and puts on the mantle. As playwrights, we want to move our audience, to change or deepen their thoughts and feelings, to give them something to remember. Jon Jory, the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, has said that a talent he looks for in playwrights is the ability to make metaphor from ordinary human events.
There are big play ideas, and there are small play ideas. A big idea might concern “the ends of ambition,” as in Macbeth, or “racism” in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror. But there are other ideas within these plays. Ideas about war, magic, fate, children, politics and marriage permeate Macbeth. Ideas about religion, perspective, the decline of New York City, the media, revenge and justice permeate Fires in the Mirror. All successful plays contain big and small ideas.
Ideas, however, don't in themselves make a play successful. “War is bad” is a nugget, to echo Woolf. But a good play and a bad play can have the same nugget of an idea. It is not the quality of the idea that matters most, but rather the quality of the ideas as depicted by the actions of the play.
Even more basic, especially for beginning playwrights, is the question of which should come first, the ideas or the story. There's no right answer to this question.
If you happen to come up with a theme first (war is bad), the act of writing the play will be a working out of this theme. If this is the case, you are most likely the sort of writer who will intellectualize an idea, then articulate that idea in dramatic actions. If, on the other hand, you decide on the actions of the story first, you're most likely the sort who follows inner instincts, inner voices, and an innate dramatic sense. If you're talented and gifted, the actions will often lead organically to the thematic idea, whether you're conscious of it or not.
I don't believe Shakespeare sat around trying to come up with a play that would encapsulate his thinking on the subject of ambition and after a long period of diligent research and strenuous planning came up with something called Macbeth. Nor do I believe he blithely stumbled upon the story of a Scot's murderer, wrote a blood-curdling thriller, and then looked up, surprised, as if to say, “Why, I had no idea my crime story would turn into such a fascinating dissertation on the subject of ambition!”
Maybe some great playwrights start with the great thematic idea, but the truth is that good dramatists have a nose for an exciting story that has the potential for exciting ideas.
The anecdote about how Peter Shaffer came to write Equus is famous. The playwright was driving through the English countryside with a friend. The friend mentioned a story he'd heard: A stable boy had blinded six horses in a remote English village. No one ever discovered the reason for the mutilation, but it shook the small community in which it happened. Shaffer's friend died soon thereafter, and he was never able to verify the story. But he knew he'd just heard a great idea for a play. When Peter Shaffer heard that story he knew he had the makings of a play with a great mystery, strong characters, a forward-moving story and terrific theatricality. He also saw the potential for a play of ideas—ideas about passion, intellect, madness, sex, religion and the human spirit.
A playwright connected to her imagination, her intellect and her environment gathers many disparate stimuli and makes them into a play. Playwrights get their ideas from their observations of the wider world, their observations of the people around them, and their observations of their own souls—their own concerns, convictions, fears and desires.
Something that is painfully true about drama and theater is that the limits of stage time (one hour, two hours, even five hours) and the length of a play text (75–150 pages) do not lend themselves to a multitude of ideas. The novel—especially the Big Novel of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Norman Mailer—has a lot more ro
om for ideas. The dramatist must make the most of the little time and space he has. He must be economical. He must choose the most important ideas and leave out the rest. The smart dramatist knows better than to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the idea pile.
The best plays come from ideas that are
• personal/societal/spiritual concerns of the playwright
• personal/societal/spiritual concerns of the audience
• best shown through dramatic action
There two ways to articulate an idea in a play:
1. Characters state the idea overtly—in speeches, in dialogue, either to other characters or directly to the audience. This is the direct, rhetorical approach.
2. Actions depicted in the play make the audience think of the idea. This is the Character + Conflict × Action = Ideas approach.
Of these two, always choose Number 2. This is not to say that the playwright can't speak directly to the audience. Sometimes characters come downstage, look out over the footlights at the audience and simply talk. But there is a strategy to these direct-address approaches. When will an audience be most receptive to this kind of rhetorical speech?
• At the beginning of a play, when everything is new and an audience is at one of its highest states of awareness and attentiveness (see the opening of Equus);
• Following a large action, when an audience needs a “cooling off” and is receptive to a rational means of understanding (see the choral reportage that tells the story of the Rumanian revolution in the middle section of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest);
• Preceding a pending, expected action, when audience anticipation is highest (see the prebattle St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry V);
• Between a vital question posed and a vital answer delivered, when an audience leans forward to discover the solution to a mystery or a central dramatic question (see Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, and, yes, Hamlet);
• At the end of the play, when an audience is seeking the final summation (see the last speech of Wallace Shawn's disturbing political play Aunt Dan and Lemon).
So, yes, there are strategic points in a script where the shrewd playwright can place rhetorical speeches and deliver ideas. But I will make this argument: An audience will always listen more carefully and become more personally involved with an idea when it is presented dramatically. It is one thing to hear a psychiatrist in a play say “Sometimes it's better to leave a person with her delusions than it is to cure her.” It is another to see her
• Try to Cure her patient
• Fight the delusion
• Cure the patient
• Witness the light go out of the patient's eyes
• and Reverse the painful results of “sanity”
It's the show-don't-tell principle. Remember: An audience is a detective. They look for evidence, and they believe what they can see. What they can see are the actions. The best way, then, to convince an audience of your ideas is to give them ideas embedded in the action, developed by the action, and understood in the action.
If you spoon-feed your audience too much, they become lazy, less interested, and less receptive to your ideas. Playwrights often forget one of the actors in the drama—the audience. The audience has goals too: to understand, to comprehend, to make sense of what is happening onstage. There is a direct dynamic with the audience, and a dynamic requires points of tension, push and pull—like isometrics. This muscular dynamic requires work. And an audience likes to work in the theater. They like to try to figure out things; they look for clues (“Match wits with Inspector Hamlet!”). They'll listen to characters expound directly, and by extension they will listen directly to the playwright. But if the audience senses, even unconsciously, that it isn't doing any work, that there isn't an active role for them to play in their relationship with the play and its ideas, then an audience doesn't really know why it was invited to the show in the first place. Underline the word “unconsciously” here. I don't think audiences are very cognizant of this dynamic or their need to work in the theater. But the dynamic exists, and the playwright who ignores it throws her ideas out into the wind.
Sometimes characters debate ideas, as they do in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, but there are always personal dramatic stakes. The outcome of a debate on war and munitions-making may affect a marriage, as in Shaw's Major Barbara. When the idea is worked into the fabric of the dramatic action, when the stakes involved are human stakes, then the ideas are not simply bumper stickers tossed from the stage. The ideas are blood and flesh and fire and oxygen, the fuel of characters who are in the process of making discoveries about the world, their fellow creatures and themselves as a result of their thinking and their acts. In these instances, debates are human actions.
Meaning is best articulated in the minds of the audience who have witnessed the events and reached their own conclusions. It is this joined activity that the playwright and the audience embark on that makes the journey and the discovery worthwhile. Theater is often referred to as a collaborative art. And in this question of ideas, as in many others, the playwright should remember that her most important collaborator is her audience.
EXERCISES
1. What ideas are important to you as a playwright, as an artist, as a human being? Make a list of some of these ideas.
2. Do any of these ideas connect to any of the dramatic actions you developed in the previous exercises? If so, write down the action that would display one of these ideas. If not, find an action that does. Write that down.
3. Look at the actions you developed in the previous exercises. The actions tell you something about your characters. But what do the actions tell you about the world in which the characters live? Do the actions you choose say anything about life, love, mortality, youth, politics, race, or a thousand other subjects? If not, consider other potential actions that might engender these kinds of ideas. Write the various actions and ideas on paper. How many different actions can depict the same idea? How many different ideas are inherent in a single action?
4. Now turn one of your ideas into a short scene. Use two characters, your protagonist and your antagonist. Put them in conflict. Make them do battle over something tangible (an object, a decision, a concrete goal). Dramatize the idea (war is bad, charity is good, suicide is defensible) without ever mentioning the idea in words. Let the actions speak for themselves.
LANGUAGE
Language refers to what is spoken onstage by the actors in a play. Most of a play's action and meaning is articulated through language, what a character says, how a character speaks. Aristotle wrote about language as “tone, imagery, and cadence (sound).” He argued that its power lies in its many incarnations onstage—as verse, metaphor, strophe, antistrophe, jest, rhyme and epigram.
The language of a play is often discussed as if it were separate from character, plot and ideas—as if the audience could understand character, plot and ideas without a play's language. With very few exceptions, every action depicted in a play is depicted through language. One could even say that, in drama, language is action. Even stage actions that ostensibly take place without dialogue—a kiss, a duel—either follow language that refers to the action or precedes language that results from the action.
When an audience member leaves a successful play like Hamlet and is asked about what she recalls of the play, she will most likely note two things: memorable events and actions—“when all those Danish people got killed at the end”; memorable dialogue—“To be or not to be.”
Good dialogue tells the audience what it needs to know—the time period, background, setting and style of a play—but above all, good dialogue creates an event, changes the dynamic of the plot, and alters the characters' lives. It is action-oriented. It has a subject and a predicate, and it emphasizes the verb. An active verb is dramatic. Good dialogue is language doing. Good dialogue is both expressive and economical. In most plays, it must shift tenses const
antly:
• It must deliver exposition (what has happened).
• It must depict action (what is happening).
• It must promise future action (what may happen).
Present tense action-dialogue is informed by the past and in turn informs the future, all the while seeming natural to the character's speech, psychology and education. The following quote from Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes is a fine example of this past/present/future kind of dialogue:
REGINA: I'm smiling, Ben. I'm smiling because you are quite safe while Horace lives. But I don't think Horace will live. And if he doesn't I shall want 75% in exchange for the bonds. And if I don't get what I want I am going to put all three of you in jail.
A well-drawn character with language specific to that character will never sound like another character. Diction, grammar, word choice and syntax are all clues to character. Good dialogue identifies the character of its speaker. Even without their characters' names printed on the page we would recognize a key line of dialogue spoken by Richard III or by Blanche DuBois from Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire or by Ricky Roma from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Which of them said, “Now is the winter of our discontent”? Which said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”? Which said, “All train compartments smell vaguely of shit”?
Have you ever done this? You're reading a play. The dialogue sounds less like the writer has listened to his characters than assigned lines to them. The names are not memorable, so you find that you keep paging to the front to check the character list to try to keep them sorted in your mind. If the play has a list of the original actors, maybe you start trying to hear their voices to help make the distinction. Still you can't figure out who's saying what. But, you argue, onstage that won't be a problem. We'll see and hear the dialogue coming out of the actors' mouths. True. But neutral-sounding dialogue—generic dialogue—has a flattening effect on an audience. When all the characters sound alike, a dullness sets in. Dialogue must not only move action, it must define character.
The Art and Craft of Playwriting Page 6