The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  Hatcher: Change of topic. This is the “seductive lollipop” question. Some plays find more success than other plays, either commercially or artistically. You've spoken to me about the ingredients a playwright often puts into a play to entertain, hook, bring in an audience—seductive lollipops you called them. Then there are those plays that don't have that same kind of hook, but still attention must be paid.

  Blessing: I think any actor knows that he's going to play a whole spectrum of roles in his career, and some of those are going to have an absolute magnetism for an audience. Zero Mostel played a lot of roles, but they weren't all Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He played even more wonderful roles in other important plays. But there are some that just click, like Tevye. It's what every actor hopes for—that's the one they'll be remembered for, that's the one that will enhance their career. It's similar when you write plays. They all have value as projects. Almost all of them are intensely enjoyable to create and produce. Not all of them have whatever that magical thing is, and you can't always tell what it's going to be either. It's not always in the realm of what's humorous or appealing or sentimental or massaging or easy or melodramatic. Or seductive. Sometimes it can simply have to do with a question the society is asking itself subliminally and intensely at the time. A good play can hit for that reason. 'Night, Mother was like that. It said something to people that was important to them about life and death, about the value of living life as a woman in America today, in a country that didn't value a certain class of women or women as a class in a way it probably ought to.

  Hatcher: What do you find most troubling about a play? Let's say a friend or colleague has written a play or you've written a play and you think it's dealing with a subject matter that should be dealt with—maybe it's addressing issues that other people aren't addressing, you think it's a good play. And yet it's not cooking in all the right ways. The audiences aren't flocking to see it. Do you think that some dramatists “write out of their time” and that it will take twenty years for their plays to win favor?

  Blessing: I don't think a playwright can spend his or her time worrying about that. One simply has to write and do as well as one can with each project—be as ambitious as one can be as a writer with each project and try to work with the best people one can work with. I honestly think, especially from a writer's point of view, there is no way to predict or try to manipulate how a play will do with audiences in general. You can try to learn from how your earlier plays have done, but I think it only can diminish you as a writer to start making that your top priority. As for people writing for their own time or people writing ahead of their time, I'm sure it happens. We write plays because it's a challenging genre, we have a talent for it and there is on some level pleasure in producing good plays, good scripts. If audiences happen to like it as well, that's wonderful.

  Hatcher: Now you're working on something new, but you don't want to talk about it because …

  Blessing: Because it would be bad for me to talk about it.

  Hatcher: Why do you think it's bad?

  Blesssing: It tends to diminish one's energy for actually writing the piece. Every writer wants to get out of writing to begin with. That goes without saying. When you're a writer your highest priority is how to keep from writing. And so you have to guard against too many things that make it too easy not to write. One of the things that I think makes it easy not to write is to be able to go down to the coffeehouse and sit with your friends and tell them all about this great new idea you have. Once you've expressed it, you sort of have the entire pleasure of getting the feedback from the original conception, and it's very hard to bank up sufficient energy then to go to all the trouble of writing it. Writing takes a long time. It's slow going, and you need to keep the carrot out in front of you a little bit. I want to keep that carrot.

  Marsha Norman

  Marsha Norman won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for her play 'Night, Mother. The play also won four Tony nominations, the Dramatists Guild's prestigious Hull-Warriner Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A feature film, starring Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, with a screenplay by Norman, was released in August 1986. 'Night, Mother has been translated into twenty-three languages and has been performed around the world.

  Her first play, Getting Out, received the John Gassner Playwrighting Medallion, the Newsday Oppenheimer Award and a special citation from the American Theatre Critics Association. Her two one-act plays, Third and Oak: The Laundromat and The Pool Hall premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Her play The Hold-Up was workshopped at ATL as well. Traveler in the Dark premiered at American Repertory Theatre and was later staged at the Mark Taper Forum under the direction of Gordon Davidson. Sarah and Abraham premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1987 and was produced at the George Street Playhouse in the fall of 1991.

  Norman received a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for her Broadway musical The Secret Garden. Her play Loving Daniel Boone had its premiere at the 1992 Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, and her latest play, Trudy Blue, premiered in the 1995 Humana Festival. She wrote the book and lyrics for The Red Shoes, with music by Jule Styne.

  Marsha Norman, Four Plays was published by Theatre Communications Group in 1988. Her first novel, The Fortune Teller, was published in 1987. Norman has worked in television and film, including most recently Face of a Stranger, starring Gena Rowlands and Tyne Daly.

  Norman has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Academy and Institute of Letters. She has been play wright-in-residence at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and she has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Achievement. She serves on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, and on the boards of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Independent Committee for Arts Policy. She is the recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

  Jeffrey Hatcher: How do you recognize a play idea that lends itself to drama and theater? Is there a rule of thumb you use when you're thinking up plays and receiving ideas from the world?

  Marsha Norman: I think that the pieces for the theater clearly have to be events that must be witnessed. You have to see it to believe it. This is the rule about a theatrical piece—“You Were There.” You would never believe that this thing could happen. That is, I think, a quality of a good piece for the theater. Somehow your presence as an audience is required. Pieces that have to do with great geographic scale—obviously those things are better done in films. Quite frankly, pieces that are about sort of domestic interiors that require close but not deep attention are better for television. We're in a curious place in the development of the theater where we need to think a lot about what can only be done in the theater and just do that. My new play, for example, takes place entirely in the leading character's mind. You don't know that because you are flipping around from scene to scene seeing all kinds of events and hearing people who were never in the same room together and all that kind of life of the mind on the stage. That's what I think we need to be looking for more overtly, to find the theatrical event.

  Hatcher: If you were to see something in the newspaper or overhear a conversation and you started to apply certain tests to it and you thought to yourself, “Well, I'd like to write it as a play; but I can see it just as readily as a novel or a screenplay,” would you avoid it entirely as a theater piece or would you search for something theatrical about it?

  Norman: When I have ideas for plays I try to dismiss them immediately so that I only end up writing the plays I have to write.

  Hatcher: The ideas that insist themselves?

  Norman: There are lots of unnecessary plays written. Those are the ones that cause you lots of pain. The good ones are pieces that have to be, as I say, witnessed by a group. They are communal from the beginning, and those are the things that work best in the theater. Look at a play like Brian Friel's Faith Healer, for exa
mple. The telling of it has to be in the theater. That's the way that it best moves people. Our Town would be the dopiest novel in the world, and it would make a really silly movie. Whenever there are elements of the paranormal, the extranormal, the nondomestic, those are the things that belong best in the theater.

  Hatcher: In his book The Empty Space the director Peter Brook says that when he was shooting the film of King Lear, the problem was that he actually had to film the real beach where Gloucester dies, but the wonderful thing about the stage is that the blind Gloucester thinks that he is on a cliff, his son knows they're on a beach, and as far as the audience is concerned they're on a set of stage planks—you can be in three different spaces at the same time; but you can never do that in film. You've got to be specific.

  Norman: Right. We actually experience our lives closer to the way that they are presented in the theater than the way they are presented in film and TV. I think people get disenchanted when their lives don't work out the way they do in film and TV, and they don't have all the correct costumes and they don't have people who say the right things, and they don't look the right way. Television has created a world full of spectators. Theater always creates a world of participants.

  Hatcher: This is a quote of yours: “In the theater you're in jail for two hours, and if you don't make the audience happy they're going to be really pissed off.”

  Norman: That's true. That's why I think that criticism for the theater is often so brutal, because the critics actually get mad. You kept them there for that time, and they didn't like it. They had other ideas about what to do with their evening.

  Hatcher: When you're looking at an idea for a play and it's demanding to be written, how quickly does it turn into a question of character?

  Norman: It's almost always a question of character. I know that other people write from different motivations, but I almost always write with a desire to understand the action of one person. Why did this person do that? In other words, I become aware of an act. If we could use 'Night, Mother for a moment, I became aware of the act of this woman who killed herself, who lived with her mother for her whole life, who suddenly said, “'Night, Mother,” went in the bedroom and killed herself. And you think, “Why did she do that? How did she do that? And why do I think it was an act of courage?” I tend to only write about acts of courage, so it's easy to answer questions about this. I see somebody doing something that I think is a really powerful move, and I know that it's not generally recognized as a powerful move. I know that it's my task as playwright to get it into the right category. I know people who would say, “Oh, well, Jessie, that's just a selfish thing to do” or “That's just a defeatist weak thing,” and I think that, no, actually in this case for this woman committing suicide was the realization of her own power over her life; and that's what she wanted to do with it. She could have at the moment made any number of decisions. At that place of power she could have decided to go to beauty school, for example; but I don't think they would have given me the Pulitzer Prize for it.

  Hatcher: You've talked a lot about the need for characters to take control of their lives, just as people need to take control of their lives. Is that the primary action of a two-hour play?

  Norman: It's very important to select the two hours from that person's life or the collected moments that add up to two hours from which the whole life is visible. You want to be able to see how they got into this predicament, you want to see what the predicament is, and you want to have a sense of what they're going to do and where the life will take them. Lots of time people choose the two hours too soon or two hours too late. You can easily imagine a 'Night, Mother play that's written from the viewpoint of the funeral. Jessie's in her casket and Momma and all her friends are gathered around and the play begins then and the whole thing is done in flashbacks. This would be just silly, hopelessly boring. In 'Night, Mother the way it's structured you know that she is going to kill herself, but you don't believe it. And it's your lack of belief, it's your struggle against this inevitability that somehow creates the drama—because this is the drama that everybody lives with all the time: Am I gonna make it to the end of this?

  Hatcher: How much do you think about the audience before you write a play and while you're writing it?

  Norman: I don't think about them too much, but I know a lot about them instinctively. I know that they have to laugh every now and then or they'll get fidgety. I know that they have to be rooting for something for that character and they have to know what it is that character wants and be able to see that that character is trying very hard to get it. The audience loses patience so fast with characters who aren't really active in their own behalf.

  Hatcher: Do you think a character has to be likeable?

  Norman: I don't think they have to be likeable, but I think they have to be understandable. The audience has to be able to say, “If I were that person, I would do that. If I had that history, that experience, those disabilities, that anger, that whatever-it-is, then I would do that.” It has to be comprehensible. It's like the writing of villains—you know, the better reasons they have to be villains the better villains they are.

  Hatcher: Your connection to an audience is instinctive?

  Norman: Yes. People who are storytellers have grown up telling stories and watching the audience, whether it was their parents or their friends in school or people on the telephone or whatever, and you know about the timing of individual lines, you know the things that make people interested. You know how to drop little hints so that the audience begins to unravel the story for itself.

  Hatcher: Were you a storyteller when you were a kid?

  Norman: I was, but I also grew up at the knees of a great one. My grandfather was one of the most gifted storytellers in the world. He grew up in New Mexico where there were all these great stories to be told, things about ranching and wheat-threshing crews and tangles with snakes.

  Hatcher: So did you find that storytelling came naturally to you?

  Norman: Absolutely. It's an instinct. I think that somehow there is this ancient occupation of the storyteller, the tribal storyteller; and these occupations—just like the other ones of shoemakers and cobblers and canners and beer-makers—are all passed down. There is a need in the community for someone to tell the stories of the tribe and tell what has gone before and preserve a sense of what it has felt like to be alive in this time. It's oral history on the hoof, as it were, and there's basic survival information in the plays that we keep around. Oedipus has been around not just because it's a great piece of writing; it's because there's something in it that everybody has to know. We write them and present them and then the culture decides whether to retain them. Obviously when a society forgets an important story, we can get into trouble.

  Hatcher: When you started to attend the theater, did you observe and absorb lessons about theater craft or did you study it later?

  Norman: I was a thirsty child who spotted water. I think that I knew that this was somehow the world that I belonged in. I didn't act on that for a long time because I didn't really believe it was possible. I was under the impression I was going to have to be a missionary or something; but I watched, I listened, I absorbed lots of this. I don't think there's a better way to learn about the theater than just go a lot because what you want to do for an audience as a writer is create a theatrical experience. In other words, you don't want to create a reading experience, it's not an intellectual experience, it's an experience of being in the theater and responding as a body, as a human physical body to what's going on on the stage. Your mind, your body are all one. You can't get a play just from reading it. You have to be there. So, when the idea is to create an experience for people, what you can do to learn about it and learn how to do it is to have the experience as much as possible. If you were designing roller coasters, you would go and ride all the great ones. You would listen and watch for when people screamed. You wouldn't read about them.

  Hatcher: Let me jump over to the s
ubject of rules. You like to experiment with the rules of playwriting. Which are the unbreakable ones and which are the breakable?

  Norman: The unbreakable ones are no passive central character and no more than one central character. The central character has to want something that is within his or her means. I used to think that the Aristotelian notion of time was an unbreakable rule, but I no longer believe that. I do think that the action has to be circling around one issue and be driven by the needs of one character. The reason audiences respond better to one protagonist is because this is how we experience our own lives. We have a collection of issues, and we deal with them one at a time. We all feel that we are the center of our own story.

  Hatcher: Aside from the question of breaking time frames, what other rules do you like to play with onstage? You've experimented with time travel and multiple story frames in Loving Daniel Boone and Sarah and Abraham, for example.

  Norman: What I like best to play with is the notion that the visible and the invisible are quite close and in fact they are both sensible and active realms in which we play. That the invisible is woven around and through the visible in our daily lives. By the invisible I mean there are people from the past, people who are dead, people who never existed, people we dreamed of, ideas that we had, dreams, hopes, fears, those things all might as well be characters that are walking around on a stage. My own fear of heights, for example, in certain circumstances could very well be dressed up with me and screeching at me the whole time. Our minds operate in a world where fears become personified. On the other hand, people transform into other shapes. I'm sure that my mother in my mind is actually seventy to eighty feet tall and very loud and very powerful, in spite of the fact that she is a sixty-four-year-old woman who died five years ago. In the theater we can present things as they seem, not as they are. In Trudy Blue, for example, when I have people who are fantasy figures walking around in between conversations that are actually happening, this is how it is. This is actually what happens. Our world is populated by the people that we dream about and that we fear and not just the ones that we could actually go pinch.