The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  “Oh, I am going to work in the household of Mrs. George Haverland Coe of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In-service just like yourself, but I could never claim a position as fancy as you. To be in service to such a fine family, I am very impressed indeed to be sure.”

  And then more talk. And laughter, very hushed and silent.

  And then the question. And the question again. And again. And then an answer.

  And the bible is placed aside near the “Strand.”

  And then, in the dark, in the silence, in the murmur of the machines in the heart of the ship, a finger draws along the side … and wakes.

  “It's the ghost of your aunt, Mrs. James, wagging a finger at her naughty niece.”

  And I laugh. And we go on.

  And then there is another knock on the door. And voices in the passageway.

  “We should go up and see …”

  “No, darlin', not yet.”

  “We should go up and see what it is …”

  “No, not yet. A little longer, darlin'. A little longer.”

  But I want to see what it is, and I look out the porthole.

  And it is a sea of ice, mountains of ice going by, so beautiful in such a calm, black sea. We've stopped, and we can look out at this beautiful field of ice.

  “Let's go up,” I say. “Let's go up and see.”

  But we don't.

  “Listen to me, darlin'. I must go up to the master, or there'll be hell to pay. But I'll come back. You wait under the covers, and when I come back I'll take you up to see the ice. I know a way to get up to the First Class Promenade Deck where we can see, and no one will know. I know a way up through a central passageway, a passageway that runs all the way through the length of the ship, from bow to stern.

  “The officers call it ‘Park Lane.’

  “The crew calls it ‘Scotland Road.’

  “We'll go up, we'll go up all the way on ‘Scotland Road.’

  “And I'll show you the ice, I'll show you the mountains of ice. I'll take you up ‘Scotland Road.’ ”

  “Take me up. Take me up. Take me all the way to the Hebrides.”

  He was so beautiful. My handsome valet to the Astors.

  He never came back.

  The monologue answers a lot of the play's mysteries and dramatic questions:

  • How the woman came to be on the ship.

  • Who the man in the photograph was.

  • What the connection is with the Astors.

  • Why the woman didn't get off the ship.

  • How she died.

  • And what the title of the play, “Scotland Road,” refers to (it was never mentioned earlier in the play).

  John is silent during this speech. He would never dream of interrupting her. Nor would the audience.

  TECHNICAL TIPS

  There are many different ways of “writing” dialogue, some of which have nothing to do with pens, pencils or keyboards. The playwright August Wilson has said that he doesn't so much “write” his characters as “listen” to them. If the author of Fences and The Piano Lesson is right—that dramatic characters speak to their creators—it's important for us to get their quotes right. Sometimes your fingers can keep up with the speed of their dictation—at the keyboard, at the legal pad—and sometimes they can't. In those cases, you can just talk.

  I don't think one word of Neddy came from my brain straight to the typewriter. The legal pad was always an intermediary. But so was a tape recorder, a pocket-sized one I carried with me. Like a lot of writers I used to carry a notebook to jot down overheard dialogue, scraps of the world around me. But I can never find my pens, so I bought the tape recorder and started mumbling into it. I found that dictation was useful to me and still is, even in the computer age. For Neddy, I often dictated whole speeches, sometimes a whole scene into the tape recorder. That often facilitated the flow I needed, the stream of consciousness. This isn't to say I didn't rewrite these speeches or scenes later; I did. But sometimes your own voice can take you into the character or the scene in a completely unfiltered way. And so I used the tape recorder to help engender that flow. Much of the dialogue and all of the monologues I dictated stayed in the play. I can't recommend this for everyone, but it has its uses, especially for monologues.

  ONSTAGE EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTOR

  Every playwright should try her hand at acting, even if it's just in a sit-down reading of a script. Act in old plays (Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Williams), act in contemporary plays (Guare, Norman, Churchill, Albee, Mamet, Wasserstein, Durang), and act in brand-new plays that aren't finished yet (fill in your own names here). You'll learn a lot. You'll learn what it's like to get through an overwritten speech or a badly shaped joke. What it's like to read dialogue that doesn't move action. What it's like to say words that don't seem to come from the character who's speaking them. And if you're fortunate, you'll occasionally get to read dialogue that works.

  EXERCISES

  1. No dialogue please, we're dramatists.

  Some of the most famous dramatic scenes have little or no dialogue: Nora's exit in A Doll's House; the final duels in many of Shakespeare's tragedies; the “blinding” of the horses in Equus; the ritual hari-kari suicide of Gallimard in M. Butterfly; the nursing of the dying man at the end of The Grapes of Wrath.

  In one to two pages, write a scene with one, two or more characters involving tension, conflict, character-based action and suspense in which no dialogue is spoken.

  2. What you don't say.

  Subtext concerns the meaning and relationships that lie under dialogue or action. In one to three pages, write a scene in which two characters express love for each other. They will never say the words “I love you.” They will never refer to their own feelings for each other. But it is vital that the audience understand that these feelings exist. Choose an action the characters have just performed, are performing, or are about to perform. Note: You may add a third character if you would like.

  3. Do the same exercise. But this time change the word “love” to “hate.”

  4. Subtext and juxtaposition.

  Many scenes only begin to make dramatic sense in context, when their actions are juxtaposed against the other scenes and actions. Harold Pinter is a master of juxtaposition; see “Betrayal.”

  Take this example:

  Scene One: A man and a woman meet over a breakfast table. The man says, “I'll see you at seven tonight.”

  Scene Two: The woman with another man. She says to him, “He'll be home at seven.”

  What is happening? What's going to happen? What's the subtext?

  Scene Three: The woman and the second man wait in a darkened dining room. The first man enters. Lights go on. A crowd of people emerge from the kitchen with a cake. They shout “Surprise!” It's a birthday party.

  But what if Scene Three ended differently? A darkened room. The first man enters. A gun goes off. The lights are turned on. The first man lies dead. The second man holds a gun. Now it's a murder plot.

  In each case, the meaning of the second scene subtext has been changed by what is learned in the following scene, juxtaposed against it.

  In three scenes of no more than one page each, show how the dramatic, subtextual meaning of the second scene is altered by the information/action revealed in the third scene. Then write an alternative third scene, so that meaning is changed again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hedda Gabler: A Script Analysis

  As you might have guessed by now, I believe in learning from the plays that have come before us. There's immeasurable value in analyzing great plays to learn how they work. In this chapter, we'll focus on one play from start to finish: Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen. By analyzing the play's sources (where Ibsen got the idea for his drama), its structure, its characters, and its various dramatic devices, you'll gain a clearer understanding of how plays work, enabling you to apply these lessons to your own writing.

  Written in 1891, Hedda Gabler is the story of a woman of passionate
desires. These desires might have led her to a life of intellectual creativity, or one of bohemian nonconformity. But because of her bourgeois social upbringing, she has a great fear of scandal. Her fear is almost pathological, and it has caused her to make safe choices as opposed to adventurous ones. The play depicts a thirty-six-hour period in her life during which her desires and her fears clash, bringing her to a crisis and leading to the destruction of the man she loved and her own suicide.

  By taking apart the components of the play, we can learn a lot about how it was conceived and built. A great play can't be reduced to its components, of course. A great play is enlarged by original thinking, exuberant spirit, gut instincts, and the beat of the human heart. But if a play can't be described in its component parts as well as its whole, then it isn't a successfully constructed play.

  Hedda Gabler exists in one commonly accepted Norwegian text, and although its many English-language translations vary in tone and texture, there is no serious difference in what is most important—its dramatic structure, characters and actions.

  The biographical material and many of the quotes in this chapter are taken from Michael L. Meyer's excellent 1971 biography Ibsen.

  HENRIK IBSEN AND THE ORIGINS OF HEDDA GABLER

  Henrik Ibsen began writing plays in his native Norway early in life. The son of a merchant whose financial failures disrupted the family's security and well-being, Ibsen's earliest position was as an apothecary's assistant in a provincial town, the setting for his first personal drama: the fathering of an illegitimate son. The mother was the apothecary's housekeeper, ten years Ibsen's senior. While he took a certain measure of responsibility for the child's welfare and upbringing, Ibsen never met his son until late in life, almost fifty years later.

  Following his university studies, Ibsen married Suzannah Thoresen, the daughter of a well-known university dean, and began writing epic dramatic “poems” and nationalistic plays focusing on Norwegian themes and stories. Although these oversized plays were produced, they were not successful. It wasn't until 1867 with the publication and production of his great verse play Peer Gynt that Ibsen achieved fame and notoriety. Peer Gynt solidified Ibsen's reputation. He abandoned verse drama in 1873 and worked in prose dialogue form for the rest of his life. This radical departure from the traditional formality of verse was matched by Ibsen's embrace of radical social thinking and his adherence to a psychological approach to character and play structure that seemed shockingly new at the time.

  Ibsen took the idea of psychological realism and poured it into the “machinery” of what was then referred to as the “well-made play”—melodramatic nineteenth-century comedies and romances, thrillers and tearjerkers stuffed with secrets, revelations, suspense and violence. Ibsen disdained the “well-made” play—its fakery and shallow theatrics—but we can still see its mechanism at work in his plays. He took this melodramatic form and used it as the vehicle for his own brand of realism. Ibsen was combining the psychological insights and social concerns found in the literary works of Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and others with his own, and focusing them inside the precise lens of the stage. In Hedda Gabler we find the finest observable example of his dramatic structure, a dramatic structure beholden as much to Aristotelian theory as it was to the construction of nineteenth-century “well-made” melodramas and comedies. Hedda Gabler's influence on the dramatic writing that followed—on George Bernard Shaw, on August Strindberg, on Anton Chekhov and countless dramatists working to this very day—is demonstrable and acknowledged.

  By 1889, Ibsen had written a number of plays that dealt with crimes against society, the independence of women, the hypocrisy of religion and public morals, syphilis, and the dangers of social “do-gooding.” Ibsen was often vilified by critics, artists, politicians, religious leaders, academics and other public figures. He was considered a socialist in England, a revolutionary radical, thanks to George Bernard Shaw's Fabian Society pamphlet The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a work that interpreted his plays in a Marxist light.

  The first hint that Ibsen was contemplating the play that would later become Hedda Gabler comes in a letter he wrote to an admirer, Helene Raft, in October 1889. “A new poem begins to dawn in me.” (“Poem” was another term for play.) What contributed to the “poem” that would become Hedda Gabler? Ibsen was a dramatist who explored numerous landscapes and shadows for his play subjects, both public and interior:

  • Social concerns

  • Contemporaries

  • His own psyche

  Hedda Gabler is a perfect amalgam of all three. The story of a passionate woman whose obsessive longing for excitement combines with her dread of humiliation to destroy her life and the lives of others, Hedda Gabler springs from Ibsen's:

  Social Concerns. Ibsen's previous plays had championed new notions of the roles of the sexes. When the submissive Nora left her husband at the conclusion of A Doll's House, Ibsen ushered in a new understanding of the positions of men, women, marriage and sex in personal and societal interaction. It was an understanding that explored the complex connections between passion and money, between children and independence, between love and order, between law and the soul. Developing his artistic concerns along these lines, he was bound, at some point, to turn his eye to the frustration a talented, passionate soul finds in a stifling, bourgeois marriage. A frustration that leads not to “quiet desperation,” but to rage, action and malevolence.

  Hedda Gabler comes from an observation of the world.

  Contemporaries. Ibsen's circle of friends, colleagues, enemies and acquaintances provided him with rich material. In 1885, Ibsen heard the story of Sophie Magelssen, a notorious beauty who, for some unknown reason, had married Peter Groth, a decent but uninteresting academic who had just received a major university posting following a “competition” with Hjalmer Falk, a writer and philosopher commonly held to be the more gifted of the two. Why had Sophie married Groth? Where would a marriage between these two lead? What events awaited this coupling?

  Around the same time, Ibsen met Julius Elias, another academic, whose greatest ambition, as he often explained, was to burrow into other people's letters. (Ironically enough, Elias would later burrow into Ibsen's own letters, following the playwright's death in 1901.) In addition, Ibsen had long known the popular and dashing Danish writer Julius Hoffory and recalled the famous anecdote that concerned Hoffory's loss of his only copy of a much-awaited manuscript during a particularly infamous nocturnal orgy.

  Others came into Ibsen's view at this time: a well-respected couple whose marriage shattered when the husband became obsessed with another woman; a famous composer whose newest score was burned by his wife when she found a note from her husband's lover; a man who had freed himself of alcohol only to be drawn back into drinking when his disturbed wife, in an attempt to display her power over him, tempted him one night to join her for an anniversary toast.

  In Ibsen's personal life, we also find two women who influenced his thinking, his work and his heart. Emilie Bardach, whom Ibsen called the “May sun of a September life,” was a young woman he met in the mid-1880s. They began a passionate friendship that, for all its suggestions of illicit romance, never blossomed into a sexual affair. Emilie's desire for independence and romance was matched by that of another woman who seemed to share a similar place in Ibsen's life: Helene Raft, who combined Emilie's passionate desires with a cool, hard-headedness that served to further attract Ibsen's interest. Neither were artists, but both seemed to have an artistic temperament that Ibsen recognized and from which he derived ideas and energy.

  Helene Raft would write him at one point: “Women's will … tends to remain undeveloped. We dream and wait for something unknown that will give our lives meaning. As a result of this, women's emotional lives are unhealthy, and they fall victims to disappointment.”

  Neither Helene nor Emilie would ever consummate her relationship with Ibsen (biographers suggest this was because of Ibsen's inhibitions), and in the
end, Ibsen severed ties with the two women who had seemed to bring so much joy, excitement and intellectual stimulation to his late middle age.

  Hedda Gabler comes from an observation of other people.

  The Author's Psyche. Just as French novelist Gustave Flaubert, when asked to identify the model for the title character of Madame Bovary, proclaimed proudly “Emma Bovary c'est moi!”, one might as easily suspect Ibsen of a private acknowledgment that, as much as Hedda might be based on Sophie Magelssen, on Emilie Bardach, on Helene Raft, his platonic mistresses, in fact Hedda Gabler was Ibsen. Ibsen regretted the passing of his more fiery youth. He saw himself as a man who had turned his back on desire and settled for a life of respectability and comfort. Perhaps this was the price he had paid for his early romance with the apothecary's housekeeper—the birth and secret shame of his illegitimate son. Perhaps it was his early marriage, close on the heels of his affair, to a daughter of academia—a marriage that gave him love, support and sustenance, but less excitement than his nature craved. Perhaps it was a deeper and more complex fear of the sexual act; Ibsen and his wife had only one offspring, born early in their marriage, and he never allowed even his most trusted doctors to examine his sexual organs during a physical examination.

  Whatever the reason, Ibsen regretted his loss of fire. He wrote in 1887: “The great tragedy of life is that so many people have nothing to do but yearn for happiness without ever being able to find it.” Later, he would note: “It is a great delusion that one only loves one person.” And still later: “Whatever a man turns his back on gets him in the end.”

  Hedda Gabler comes from an observation of the artist's own psyche—whether conscious or not.

  HEDDA GABLER: COMPOSITION

  How did these disparate elements—these shards of social concerns, salon gossip, diary entries, letters and midnight obsessions—combine to create Hedda Gabler? Can any playwright listen to these voices and come up with a well-made work? There isn't a formula. Ibsen was an artist, and an artist listens to his world, his friends, his inner voice. An artist has antennae and collects stimuli from every part of his experience—as much from an overheard lament in a cafe as from the stories of wars and upheaval found in the pages of newspapers, books and journals. A play comes as much from a small perception as it does from the big idea. In a great play a small perception can become the big idea.