The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  JERRY: It is.

  ROBERT: Tell me, do you think that makes me a publisher of unique critical judgement or a foolish publisher?

  JERRY: A foolish publisher.

  ROBERT: I agree with you. I am a very foolish publisher.

  JERRY No you're not. What are you talking about? You're a good publisher. What are you talking about?

  ROBERT: I'm a bad publisher because I hate books. Or to be more precise, prose. Or to be even more precise, modern prose, I mean modern novels, first novels and second novels, all that promise and sensibility it falls upon me to judge, to put the firm's money on, and then to push for the third novel, see it done, see the dust jacket done, see the dinner for the national literary editors done, see the signing in Hatchards done, see the lucky author cook himself to death, all in the name of literature. You know what you and Emma have in common? You love literature. I mean you love modern prose literature, I mean you love the new novel by the new Casey or Spinks. It gives you both a thrill.

  JERRY: You must be pissed.

  ROBERT: Really? You don't think it gives Emma a thrill?

  JERRY: How do I know? She's your wife. (Pause)

  ROBERT: Yes. Yes. You're quite right. I shouldn't have to consult you. I shouldn't have to consult anyone.

  The genius of this dialogue lies not in the speeches themselves, but in what Pinter has dramatized before the scene takes place. If we didn't know before this scene that Robert was aware of Jerry and Emma's affair, this exchange would appear to be a business-and-art discussion, a sad rumination on the state of publishing and fiction in 1970s Britain. But knowing what we know, the scene becomes electric with subtext, that subtext being: “You have betrayed me, best friend. You have broken my heart. I could kill you.”

  In other words, subtext in dialogue is transmitted to an audience more by the arrangement of actions than it is by code words and euphemisms.

  Subtext is often found in two areas: understatedness and inarticulateness. The British are masters of the former (see that Betrayal scene), Americans of the latter.

  Look at this example from Private Lives by the great British playwright Noel Coward. Elyot and Amanda have been married and divorced. In the first, famous scene of the play they meet on the joined terrace of a hotel in France. They have just remarried other people that very day. They are shocked to find each other so near. They try to act like nothing much has happened and they are not affected.

  AMANDA: What have you been doing lately? During these last years?

  ELYOT: Travelling about. I went round the world you know after—

  AMANDA: (Hurriedly) Yes, yes, I know. How was it?

  ELYOT: The world?

  AMANDA: Yes.

  ELYOT: Oh, highly enjoyable.

  AMANDA: China must be very interesting.

  ELYOT: Very big, China.

  AMANDA: And Japan—

  ELYOT: Very small.

  AMANDA: Do they eat sharks' fins, and take your shoes off, and use chopsticks and everything?

  ELYOT: Practically everything.

  AMANDA: And India, the burning Ghars, or Ghats, or whatever they are, and the Taj Mahal. How was the Taj Mahal?

  ELYOT (Looking at her) Unbelievable, a sort of dream.

  AMANDA: That was the moonlight, I expect; you must have seen it in the moonlight.

  ELYOT: (Never taking his eyes off her face) Yes, moonlight is cruelly deceptive.

  AMANDA: And it didn't look like a biscuit box did it? I've always felt that it might.

  ELYOT: (Quietly) Darling, darling, I love you so.

  The last line puts the subtext right back on top again. Coward's characters are wildly articulate people. They have no trouble saying what they mean and saying it beautifully with style, wit and grace. But knowing what we know—that Elyot and Amanda have been married, that they are together again on this terrace, and, important, that they do not leave to retrieve their new spouses immediately—we understand the subtext of this wonderful exchange fully and completely: “I love you and you love me and we are still wildly attracted to each other despite this pathetic attempt to behave as if we were actually interested in discussing world travel.”

  Let's look at an inarticulate American couple. Doc and Lola are the central characters of William Inge's dark drama Come Back, Little Sheba. But this time I'm not going to tell you what came before this exchange, the last scene of the play.

  LOLA puts away the supplies in the icebox. Then DOC comes in the front door, carrying the little suitcase she previously packed for him. His quiet manner and his serious demeanor are the same asbefore. LOLA is shocked by his sudden appearance. She jumps and can't help showing her fright.

  LOLA: Docky!

  Without thinking, she assumes an attitude of fear. DOC observes this and it obviously pains him.

  DOC: Good morning, honey.

  Pause.

  LOLA: (On platform) Are … are you all right, Doc?

  DOC: Yes, I'm all right. (An awkward pause. Then DOC tries to reassure her) Honest, I'm all right, honey. Please don't stand there like that … like I was gonna … gonna …

  LOLA: (Tries to relax) I'm sorry, Doc.

  DOC: How you been?

  LOLA: Oh, I been all right, Doc. Fine.

  DOC: Any news?

  LOLA: I told you about Marie—over the phone.

  DOC: Yah.

  LOLA: He was a very nice boy, Doc. Very nice.

  DOC: That's good. I hope they'll be happy.

  LOLA: (Trying to sound bright) She said … maybe she'd come back and visit us some time. That's what she said.

  DOC: (Pause) It … it's good to be home.

  LOLA: Is it, Daddy?

  DOC: Yah. (Beginning to choke up, just a little)

  LOLA: Did everything go all right … I mean … did they treat you well and …

  DOC: (Now loses control of his feelings. Tears in his eyes, he all but lunges at her, gripping her arms, drilling his head into her bosom) Honey, don't ever leave me. Please don't ever leave me. If you do, they'd have to keep me down at that place all the time. I don't know what I said to you or what I did, I can't remember hardly anything. But please forgive me … please … please … And I'll try to make everything up.

  LOLA: (There is surprise on her face and new contentment. She becomes almost angelic in demeanor. Tenderly she places a soft hand on hishead) Daddy! Why, of course I'll never leave you. (A smile of satisfaction) You're all I've got. You're all I ever had.

  It's a reconciliation scene to be sure. A homecoming. But if you know the play you know that Doc is an alcoholic. You also know that he married Lola twenty years before when he got her pregnant. She lost the baby and couldn't have other children. Their hasty marriage crippled their early promise. There is no passion or romance in their lives. The “Marie” referred to is a boarder they took in to earn money. Marie was young and sexually attractive, and Doc lusted after her. When he saw that Marie had slept with a young man, Doc fell off the wagon, got drunk, came home and threatened to kill Lola, raging at her about “sluts” and “whores” and letting her know just how much he despised their marriage, how disgusted he was by her. At one point he grabbed a knife and screamed that he wanted to “hack all that fat off” Lola. Finally, Lola called for help, and Doc was carted away to the hospital.

  Knowing what you know now, what do you make of the subtext behind these lines:

  • “Are … are you all right, Docky?” (Have you come back to tell me our marriage is over? Are you sober again? Have you come to kill me?)

  • “It's … it's good to be home.” (I have no place else to go.)

  • “You're all I've got. You're all I've ever had.” (Our lives may still be in shambles. You probably don't love me. But what else is there for us?)

  Again it's context and placement. Your own play's action will tell you how to employ subtext. Once you know what is essential to the plot and story you're telling, you'll know what words the characters must say as well. If it isn't necessary
to say, “I love you,” don't say it.

  PLEASE TAKE MY WIFE

  Humor is essential to almost every play. There is a comedy in King Lear, in Hamlet, in Death of a Salesman, and in hundreds of other plays we think of as serious. An audience needs to laugh—for relief, for release or for pure joy. As for “official” comedies, the great scripts of Georges Feydeau, Kaufmann and Hart, Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein, Noel Coward and Christopher Durang cover every style from farce, drawing room comedy and satire to the borscht belt and surrealism. There is comic action (pratfalls, chases, hiding under beds and slamming doors), and there is comic dialogue.

  You can't learn to be funny.

  You have to have a sense of the ridiculous. But the ridiculous has to have its own weird logic. From Durang's hysterically funny and very moving The Marriage of Bette and Boo, a conversation between a grown son and his mother:

  MATT: Why do you call me Skippy? Why don't you call me Matt?

  BETTE: Skippy's my favorite movie.

  MATT: My favorite movie is Citizen Kane. I don't call you Citizen Kane.

  You have to understand irony. Irony is an awareness of the ridiculous coupled with perfect, deadpan, dry understatement, as in the following excerpt from Tom Stoppard's masterpiece about positivism, murder and morality, Jumpers, in which a philosopher attempts to explain logic and assassination:

  GEORGE: Cantor's proof that there is no greatest number ensures that there is no smallest fraction. There is no beginning. But it was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder of that, and so on, ad infinitum, the result was … that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.

  You have to mine the comic power of bottled anger when it's finally released, such as in this statement from The Odd Couple, in which Oscar is telling Felix he hates getting little notes on his pillow:

  OSCAR: “We are all out of cornflakes. F.U.” It took me three hours to figure out that F.U. was Felix Unger!

  You have to be tough enough not to shrink from nastiness. Invective is essential to comedy, especially when it has the right setup and the correct number of syllables in the punch line. In Kaufmann and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, the critic Sheridan Whiteside attacks his annoying nurse, Miss Preen:

  MISS PREEN: Oh my! You mustn't eat candy, Mr Whiteside. It's very bad for you.

  WHITESIDE: (Turning) My great aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be a hundred and two, and when she had been dead three days she looked better than you do now.

  You have to sense where to put the punch line. Imagine famous punch lines if they were mangled like this:

  • “My watch has been stolen and it was taken from me by Hildy Johnson, who is a son of a bitch.” (Apologies to Hecht and MacArthur, the authors of The Front Page.)

  • “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. Somehow he got into my pajamas, but I don't know how he did it.” (Apologies to Animal Crackers' George Kaufmann and Groucho Marx.)

  • “Please take my wife.” (Apologies to Henny Youngman.)

  • “Why did the chicken cross the road? The reason: the other side. He, the chicken that is, wanted to get over there.” (Apologies to the ages.)

  They sound like bad translations from Latvia. The rule? The key words should come at die end of the line. That's where the punch is. A “periodic sentence” is a line in which the meaning and intent of the sentence is only revealed by its last word or words. An example would be Dorothy Parker's famous cocktail party joke: “If you laid every woman at this party from end to end I wouldn't be a bit surprised.” Or Richard Greenberg's rueful observation from his one-act comedy about love, Life Under Water: “If I didn't trust you so much I'd be a lot wiser.” The audience expects the logic of the sentence to go in one direction, but the writer spins it in another. The crisp logic shift and the jolt of the surprise makes us laugh.

  You have to know the difference between “witty” and “funny.” Sometimes witty is funny. In Tony Kushner's Angels in America, two men discuss the loss of a pet:

  LOUIS: Cat still missing?

  PRIOR: Not a furball in sight … I warned you, Louis. Names are important. Call an animal “Little Sheba” and you can't expect it to stick around.

  But sometimes witty is clever without being funny. From Noel Coward's famous Private Lives, Elyot is complaining about Amanda:

  ELYOT: Women should be struck regularly, like gongs.

  Clever, but not very funny, especially nowadays. What is funny in Private Lives—along with most of this great comedy—is this exchange between the adulterous Elyot and Amanda, who, as we saw in the exchange quoted earlier, used to be married to each other but are now married to new spouses.

  AMANDA: Do you realize that we're living in sin?

  ELYOT: Not according to the Catholics; Catholics don't recognize divorce. We're married as much as ever we were.

  AMANDA: Yes, dear, but we're not Catholics.

  ELYOT: Never mind, it's nice to think they'd sort of back us up.

  Now that's funny.

  And you have to be able to write comic lines that are funny, not only by themselves (“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune … to lose both seems like carelessness”) but funny in their dramatic context. Noel Coward, one of the funniest writers in the English language, said that the biggest laugh he ever got in the theater came after this line from Hay Fever: “Well, go on …” It's not funny by itself. But in context, it's a killer. The setup is that Judith Bliss is a charming and wildly egotistical actress. When a young man named Sandy comes to visit the Bliss family one weekend, Judith sits down with him for a chat. The subject of her acting comes up:

  JUDITH: Have you ever seen me on the stage?

  SANDY: Rather!

  JUDITH: What in?

  SANDY: That thing where you pretended to cheat at cards to save your husband's good name.

  JUDITH: … “The Bold Deceiver” …

  SANDY: You were absolutely wonderful. That's when I fell in love with you.

  JUDITH: (Delighted) Was it really?

  SANDY: Yes, you were so frightfully pathetic and brave.

  JUDITH: (Basking) Was I?

  SANDY: Rather!

  (There is a pause)

  JUDITH: Well, go on …

  It's her grandiose desire for even more praise that brings the house down. The laugh is based on our knowledge of her character and our expectations of what she'll do. This is active, character-based, situation-based comedy. It's the most rewarding kind of comedy to write because it's the most dramatic way to write.

  MONOLOGUES

  Remember the playwright Gram Slaton's quote? “Monologues are the easiest speeches to write and the hardest to justify”—particularly when there's another character onstage listening to the speaker. One question you should ask yourself when you're experimenting with monologues is this: If there's someone else onstage, why isn't she interrupting the speaker? There has to be either (a) a specific dramatic situation that keeps the listener silent (mute, bound-and-gagged, unconscious), or (b) the monologue is so moving/thrilling/suspenseful/portentous that the listener would never dream of interrupting.

  I faced this challenge when I was writing Scotland Road, a contemporary mystery about a woman found on an iceberg in the North Atlantic, who claims she is a survivor of the Titanic. I knew the mysterious woman was going to have a big monologue at the end of the play when she finally remembered what happened the night of the Titanic's sinking. I avoided writing that speech until I was in the right frame of mind, until I knew I had the woman's rhythm and syntax ingrained in my thinking. I knew I wanted to achieve a poetic effect as well as a dramatic one. The woman's speech was designed to unlock certain mysteries posed earlier in the story. It was
also supposed to provoke her nemesis, an interrogator named John Astor, to make a decision and perform the final act of the play. The monologue would have to tell a story from the past—tell it in dramatic terms—and effect another action.

  I waited a long time to write that speech. When I was ready I turned on my tape recorder and spoke for about three minutes. As background, you need to know that the woman claims to be a survivor of a disaster that took place almost a century before. John Astor has been interrogating her for six days, trying to get her to confess that she is a fake. The interrogations have taken place in a sterile, white room. But she has not broken down. The only clues John has are (a) that the woman has screamed the first time she heard the name “Astor,” (b) that during her sleep she has been heard to mutter “Take me up, take me up, take me all the way to the Hebrides,” and (c) that she has reacted strangely when she was shown an old ship's photograph of a man standing at the top of a flight of steps. Finally, John breaks down instead, confessing that he is in fact an imposter—not an Astor at all, but simply a lonely man obsessed with the romance and mystery of the great ship. When he confesses to her, the woman speaks:

  WOMAN: The first time I saw him was at the Third Class Staircase. Sunday morning worship. Feeling the eyes across the room during the hymn and the admonition. And then the eyes meeting. A hat tipped. An offer of a walk along the deck on a Sunday afternoon. And then a spot of tea. And then supper. And more.

  And the questions.

  “What do you do before bed, darlin'?”

  “I read the bible. And then—sometimes—my ‘Strand.’ But on Sunday, just the bible.”

  And you know how they keep us in third class. Men on one end, women on the other. Like we were children, and they who run the ship know better. But you can come from one end to the other. You can come down from high above as well.

  And it's dark out. And the sea and the sky and the stars have gone by. And indeed there is the bible. Laid out on the blanket. Across my breast. Unopened. And the “Strand” even farther away.

  And the rap on the door then comes. And, yes, a talk would be lovely, although it's not really proper in the room.