The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  Language—Ibsen was never known for his flights of rhetoric. In terms of language, he was probably the least indulgent of the great playwrights of the last one hundred years. His characters say what they need to say, no more, no less. Sometimes the power of language lies in its dramatic simplicity. “Goodbye” is a simple word. We say it every day, dozens of times, to friends, family, associates, acquaintances and strangers. But it is in context that “goodbye” has such power. In the context of this scene, “goodbye” has a finality that seals the end of Nora and Torvald's life together. A relationship changes, a marriage ends, a world is revolutionized in Nora's simple “Goodbye.”

  Music—There is no actual music in A Doll's House, but in it we do find one of drama's most indelible sounds: the sound of the door closing. Like the word “goodbye” the sound of that door shutting behind Nora imparts a finality to the scene, to the play and to the characters. The thud of wood, the cold snap of a deadbolt is the final beat of a heart. The sound of that door closing—its weight, its wood and steel—tells us a lot about Nora's will, her strength, and the kind of world she's rejecting.

  Spectacle—Here, too, we return to the image of departure. Look at the onstage picture Ibsen has drawn. We see a comfortable, middle-class home complete with a Christmas tree. Everything about the image suggests safe domesticity. And then the wife leaves. It is a powerful image of departure. How many times have you seen someone you love walk away from you, perhaps never to come back? How many times did your heart break at the leaving? A hole exists where there was once a person, movement, color. The person has gone, and the picture is changed forever. Onstage entrances and exits have great power. An entrance begins an action, introduces a story, ushers in a character who may change the onstage world as we know it. A stage exit can suggest a person moving away to accomplish a great offstage task. It can also suggest a person being taken away in shame as the result of actions that have taken place before our eyes. The last image of A Doll's House is a visual summing up of all the previous dramatic actions and previous visual images that have come before it.

  Ibsen could have dispatched Nora from the stage in any number of ways. She could have left Torvald a letter. She could have decided to leave but stayed one more night. She could have avoided the word “goodbye.” She could have slipped out a window, leaving behind no sound at all. Each of these options would have been plausible. But they weren't as interesting. They weren't as dramatic. They weren't as theatrical. By combining all six elements at this crucial climactic moment of his play, Ibsen assured his audience a maximum experience, maximum impact. He assured his audience a conclusion they would never forget.

  The ending of A Doll's House reminds us of the power of Aristotle's six elements when woven together at the conclusion of a play in a memorable and satisfying whole. One does not want to be too prescriptive, but it's amazing how powerful a dramatic, theatrical moment becomes when the elements are all working together in an organic movement.

  Read the plays you love, plays that have the power to excite the senses and engage the mind. And track the ways the playwrights have woven the six elements into the drama, into the theater. Chances are you'll be amazed by how many of them are actively in play at every moment.

  EXERCISES

  1. Look over your previous exercises. Sift through the various character-driven actions, images, sounds and ideas you've sketched. Some of what you've come up with for a few of the exercises may fit with other parts of the exercises. More won't. Go back to square one. Look at your two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist. Are they the people you want them to be? Are they interesting? Do they have strong needs? What about that goal for the protagonist? Is it the right one? Look at your setting, your dialogue, the sounds and images you selected. Think about it all very carefully.

  2. Now. Start again. Create a short scene that employs all six of Aristotle's elements, in much the same way that Ibsen does for A Doll's House. You don't have to follow his method, point by point. Be imaginative. Your scene can take place in a middle-class living room or on the dark side of the moon. Your characters can be a husband and wife or two talking hot dogs. Whoever they are, create a dramatic situation. Create vibrant characters with goals; put them in conflict; energize their language through action verbs; find visual and aural complements; engender ideas through the action. It may take a few false starts and run to a few pages, but work through the exercise until you've got it. It's exciting to activate all the theatrical elements at your disposal when writing drama.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Space, Time and Causality

  In college, my theater professor Elliot Stout gave me a bit of advice I'll always remember. “If anyone ever comes up to you at a cocktail party and says, ‘What is reality?’ just reply, ‘Reality? Why, space, time and causality.’ ”

  This was German philosopher Immanuel Kant's eighteenth-century definition of reality. While Kant's definition is only one way of looking at reality, his space/time/causality model works extremely well for drama and theater. What's most useful is that for each of the three parts of Kant's definition there is a double meaning. The word means one thing within the play and in the reality being depicted; it means something else in regards to the theatrical depiction of that reality onstage.

  SPACE

  Within the reality of the play, “space” refers to the rooms, landscapes and settings of the play's action. The castle battlements of Hamlet's Elsinore, the drawing room of the Tesman household in Hedda Gabler, the desert wilderness of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In terms of the performance, “space” refers to the actual stage where the actors perform.

  Obviously, these are not the same. The stage is always representing the play's reality. Sometimes the stage is designed to appear just as the room or the desert or the battlement would. The director and the designer provide a realistic depiction of the setting that, save the absence of the “fourth wall” where the audience sits, looks just like the real thing. This realistic approach reached its zenith at the end of the nineteenth century. Castles, gardens, racetracks, ships, forests, factories all were realistically depicted at great cost and with great impact. To this day, most productions keep more than a foot in this realistic world. Within the last thirty years, apartment living rooms, kitchens, writers' studies, offices, even mountains have been successfully rendered onstage in full realistic mode. An audience is thrilled when they see a set that so painstakingly represents a reality they know (the middle-class kitchen in Willy Russell's Shirley Valentine) or have never even dreamed about (the munitions factory of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara).

  By contrast, in a nonrealistic mode, reality can still be depicted in numerous ways. Here we must acknowledge the contract signed between the audience and the theater. It is the “suspension of disbelief” that audiences allow when watching a play. The audience allows that there is no fourth wall. The audience allows that events that usually take many hours, days, weeks, months or years (dinners, meetings, trials, investigations, wars) will be depicted onstage in stage time that will amount to no more than two or three hours. The audience allows that the visual elements that depict a scene can be rendered as powerfully by one or two suggestive scenic elements as by full realistic depictions. An English sitting room could be rendered by a full realistic set, or it could be rendered by one Queen Anne sofa. An office might be rendered by a full realistic set, or it could be rendered by a desk and chair. A garden could be rendered by a full realistic set, or it could be rendered with a single trellis. In the suspension of disbelief an audience member says to herself, “If they say it's a garden, I'll believe it's a garden, even if I can see that it's just a trellis on an empty stage.” The audience is willing to play along. It's part of the fun.

  This kind of scenic shorthand is so common today and so effective that sometimes the suggestive scenic element is not even an onstage set or prop. Sometimes it's just a word. In Shakespeare, we find numerous courts, throne rooms, battlements,
beaches and blasted heaths. Seldom is there a mention of a particular piece of furniture unless it's vital to the action (Desdemona's bed, or the arras behind which Polonius hides). Shakespeare was very crafty about these things. The setting notations in the script are never more than “A Room in the Castle.” What often defines these rooms is the language, the dialogue. If the king and queen are holding court and the dialogue suggests a royal setting, it stands to reason that we are in the court. The audience doesn't need the thrones, the banners, the trappings.

  As a playwright, ask yourself this question: How might you depict a realistic setting for one of your plays? How about a hospital nurses' station? First ask yourself what is dramatically essential. What furniture or props do your characters really need? Only when you have determined what you need onstage for your characters to act and move the plot forward can you decide how to represent it.

  But, you argue, isn't that the job of the designer or director? True, some directors and designers can solve problems of set and staging, but you want to write plays that are stageworthy, and the more you can do in the writing to suggest solutions and create ideas, the better.

  The nurses' station. How to depict it:

  Realistically: A full set with all the walls, doors and hospital gadgets

  One or two suggestive scenic elements: A swivel chair and desk

  One scenic element: A counter with a sign on it that reads “Nurses' Station”

  One hand prop: A hospital clipboard

  By costume only: An actor in a nurse's uniform

  By dialogue only: MAN: “Excuse me, ma'am, is this the sixth-floor nurses' station?”

  See how quickly you can reduce the necessities?

  In today's theater, realistically reproduced settings are found primarily in one-set plays, like Felix and Oscar's living room in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple and Jessie's kitchen in Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother. More and more, stage design—especially when dealing with multiple settings—requires a nonrealistic approach. Part of the move toward nonrealistic depictions comes from the expense involved in designing and building huge realistic sets, and the playwright who ignores the financial realities of producing a play today is blindsided by his own ignorance. It is important to remember that realistic depictions of reality were primarily a nineteenth-century addition to the theater, an addition that has dominated much of the twentieth-century theater we know and love. Prior to the nineteenth-century, stage designers and playwrights were much less concerned about making things onstage appear real. Eighteenth-century Restoration comedies took place in front of flat drawings of rooms and outdoor settings. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century staging of plays by Shakespeare and Moliere often took place out of doors on wooden planks, with only the occasional table or chair brought in when necessary. And no Greek dramatist ever spent any time worrying about what Oedipus' taste in throne room furnishings was like. A Greek drama took place on a stage that would remind us more of a Gospel concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

  Realism is relatively new to the theater. And those playwrights who require realistic sets today stick to one or two. The rule of thumb: If the action requires a set, make the set realistic. If the action doesn't, allow for a lot less. Examples of necessary set pieces would include the office door behind which the real estate salesmen are taken to be interrogated in Glengarry Glen Ross, the locked room where the woman is held captive in Jane Martin's abortion-rights drama Keely and Du, and Oscar Madison's kitchen wall in The Odd Couple. Why is that wall necessary? Because Oscar throws a plate of linguini at it. No wall, no crash.

  Space onstage can be theatricalized as well with two or more scenes taking place at once. A play like Craig Lucas' haunting comedy Blue Window, which concerns a group of alienated New Yorkers, operates on multiple spatial levels at one time: two or more scenes taking place onstage at the same time but representing actions that take place in different locales. This technique is most commonly seen in musicals. One thinks of the first-act ending of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, in which all the characters sing about the “weekend in the country” they're about to embark on. The characters are understood to be in their separate homes as they read their invitations, but the audience sees them downstage at the footlights together. It is a stage convention. It is also delightful in its theatricality.

  One of my favorite memories from my early theater-going was seeing a production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park by the Steubenville Players in my hometown. If you know the play, you'll remember that in the first act the young married couple has just moved into their Greenwich Village fifth floor walk-up apartment. The apartment is a disaster, but the young wife sees it as a challenge. The first act ends. The audience takes its intermission. When they return to their seats and the lights come up, there is a gasp in the audience, followed by applause. The formerly shabby apartment has been transformed into a beautifully decorated home.

  Why does the audience applaud? Two reasons: (1) They are applauding the character of the wife, her imagination, talent and hard work. (2) They are applauding the set changeover planned by the designer and carried out by the crew during the intermission. They are applauding what took place behind the curtain. They love the idea that while they were at the intermission bar, all this activity, this transformation, was taking place. They know it's supposed to represent the efforts of many weeks, but they also know the truth: that it was all a matter of careful planning and stage tricks—panels that revolve, carpets that fit easily into place, fixtures that snap into the set's fake walls. They are applauding the reality depicted and the stage conventions used to depict it. It delights them. And in this example of realism, it was the playwright, Neil Simon, who provided the words on the page that created this delight.

  There are plays, however, that seemingly require realistic settings (offices, apartments, bedrooms), but allow for and lend themselves to great flexibility in the design. Tony Kushner's award-winning Angels in America requires over a dozen sets as varied as Roy Cohn's townhouse, Washington restaurants, a Brooklyn apartment, a federal courthouse men's room, a Salt Lake City backyard, a deserted Bronx street corner, a hospital room, Central Park and the North Pole. On Broadway, with a huge budget, these settings were rendered as realistically as possible. In fact, the Broadway production actually included an iceberg for the North Pole scene. But a close look at the script shows that it is not necessary to be quite so realistic. With the exception of Roy Cohn's desk with its complex phone system, most of the scenes can be staged without any pieces of furnishing—yes, even the North Pole. More often than not, Kushner's dialogue furnishes the setting.

  So, in this question of space, the key points to remember are these:

  • Require only those scenic elements that are absolutely necessary.

  • Know that audiences love the completeness of a realistic set.

  • Know they also love the nonrealistic theatricality of “let's pretend.”

  • Multiple realistic sets are almost prohibitive in the contemporary theater.

  • Economics often require a scenic imagination that is liberating to the writer.

  • Never say, “Let the design people worry about that.”

  TIME

  Within the reality of the play, “time” refers to the time it takes to perform the realistic action depicted in a realistic manner. A war in Macbeth or Shaw's Saint Joan might take place over months or years. A trial, such as those in Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution or Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men, takes at least weeks to complete. A late-night party such as the one depicted in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? takes four, five or six hours. In terms of the performance, “time” refers to the number of minutes it takes to watch the performance—the playing time.

  These are not necessarily the same amounts of time. While there are some plays we call Time = Time plays, in which the time it takes to perform the realistic action (real time) is exactly the same as the time it takes to watch the perfo
rmance (playing time), most plays are not written this way. Even Greek classical tragedy—which obeyed Aristotle's “unities” of time, place and action—“compressed” time.

  Let's look at the unities for a moment.

  • Unity of place—all the events take place in a single setting.

  • Unity of action—there is one central action in the play.

  • Unity of time—all the events take place in a single twenty-four-hour time period.

  Even in this ancient scheme, there was room for theatricalization. True, there may be one action in Oedipus (the hero's attempt to end the plague of Thebes), and true, the action takes place in a single setting (the royal court); nonetheless, the events of that twenty-four-hour period take far less than twenty-four hours to perform. These events and this time period were compressed into just a few hours of stage time.

  Very few contemporary dramatists write Time = Time plays, but we would all be well advised to try our hand at one. It's a demanding form that tests many different kinds of dramatic muscles. Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother comes immediately to mind. The play is a two-character one-act, performed without intermission, which makes sense in a Time = Time play, given that real time has no intermissions. But even here we have to acknowledge Norman's compression of time. Events that would take place over many hours in real life somehow take place in the neat confines of ninety minutes when depicted in her play. This, as Alfred Hitchcock once defined drama, is “life with the dull bits cut out.” The trick is to make an event seem as if it could take place in less time than it really does.

  In Anton Chekhov's Russian comedy about writers, actors and lovers, The Sea Gull, an offstage dinner party is begun and completed within about seven minutes. In Maxwell Anderson's thriller about a homicidal little girl, The Bad Seed, a three-minute cocktail hour is made to seem longer by the refrain of “Freshen that drink?” In David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a policeman is ostensibly interrogating a group of salesmen behind a closed door, but his “thorough” interrogation of each man can't possibly last more than twelve minutes each.