The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  Hatcher: In Cloud Tectonics one of the major scenes is when the woman asks the man to massage her toes, her feet, and the audience senses—and you can feel this in the house—that this may lead to other things, as well it does. At the very end of the play after many years have passed and the man is now very old and on his deathbed, the woman returns, but the woman hasn't aged a day. She returns to him and she asks him if there is anything she can do before she leaves, and he says, “Well, you could massage my feet.” You can feel the excitement and the titter and the giggle go through the audience again. That is, I would think, one of those conscious arrangements of actions on the part of the playwright.

  Rivera: Yes, that was very conscious on my part. I think the art of playwriting isn't some kind of mystical connection with a muse; the nuts and bolts of playwriting demand strict attention to craft. Good writers or lucky writers have access to imagery and to ideas and to voices, but the active part of the brain has to be engaged in a craftsman-like alignment of imagery and ideas and actions in order to make the play work, because it wouldn't work if things dangled. People talk about my plays in terms of magic realism. The fact is that the architecture of these plays is very, very strict—very, very thought out and preplanned. Those massage scenes illustrate a perfect example. Sometimes things take me by surprise. I will get to a certain point and something will happen and something prior in the writing will come back, simply insist itself and it'll be right. And the good writer takes advantage of that, listens to those happy accidents. Neil Simon talks about that in one of his books, about the “lucky accidents” that have happened in his work, and he is smart enough to leave those things in the play.

  Hatcher: There's the old story of the screenwriters of Casablanca driving around Hollywood trying to figure out the ending to the movie, and suddenly one of them looks at the other and says a line spoken earlier in the film, “Round up the usual suspects.” And they've got their ending.

  Rivera: You have to be awake to those possibilities.

  Hatcher: Do you think writers leave clues for themselves in plays, especially in a first draft or second draft?

  Rivera: I think writers leave opportunities. Good writers leave enough open-ended, unresolved, unfinished material in first drafts that can be somehow tied up later on or paid off in some way. There is a danger of doing that too far and then the play seems contrived, but it's like a biofeedback mechanism where ideas create new ideas which create new ideas which create new ideas. I think that good writers are always in tune with that.

  Hatcher: Do you always know how a play is going to end before you start it?

  Rivera: Yes, I have a good idea where I want it to go. Before I write the first draft I have the structure more or less decided. It's very important for me to find closure, to find where the parentheses end. I don't begin a project until I know where it ends. Until I know, I'm not going to commit myself to the act of writing because I can't write in an open-ended way. It just won't work for me.

  Hatcher: When you get into trouble in a draft of a play, even one that eventually turns out to be very successful, do you know what things pulled you toward the trouble spots? And do you know how to get yourself out of them?

  Rivera: I know from long experience that I have certain bad habits. I have a tendency toward long-windedness and repetition. So when I do get into trouble, it's usually because I've fallen into one of my own bad habits, one of my own traps. I'm now a fairly good editor of my work. I have a theory about writer's block. This will answer your question in an oblique way. I think writer's block is the best thing that ever happened to writers. I think it's nature's way of insuring that fewer bad books are written and fewer bad plays are written—because I find that when I'm blocked, I'm blocked not because I have a lack of ideas. It's because I have told a lie somewhere in the process. I have laid out a premise, I have set something in motion, I have created a character motion or something that is basically not true—either not true to the work or not true to real life—and that when I have a block I know that I'm lying about something, that I must go back and sniff it out. And once I've destroyed that premise, then the block disappears and the writing continues.

  Hatcher: Can it destroy an entire play?

  Rivera: I think it could. If I had gotten to some point in writing Cloud Tectonics that reached a logical impossibility—because when you deal with time you're so vulnerable to that—if I had reached that point I would have said, “I don't have a play here. I have something that is just not true. No matter how clever or interesting it is, somehow it's just not going to ring true.” I took a workshop with Gabriel García Márquez, and he said to us seven writers, “You know, when you create a work of fiction that is fantastical, you get to lie once. That's your premise, and you're granted that.”

  Hatcher: The lie is the premise?

  Rivera: Yes, whatever it is—like in this case that there is a woman who lives outside the field of time. That's obviously not true. It's never happened, never will happen; but that is the premise of this play. So you're granted that premise by the willing suspension of disbelief.

  Hatcher: But it would be unfair, for example, if she also turned out to be a witch.

  Rivera: Exactly—or a mermaid. García Márquez would say, “Okay, this premise is the fundamental lie that you are allowed to tell in order to get at the truth or a deeper truth elsewhere.” But from that point on everything must be consistent with that particular change in the physics of life. I have changed the basic physics of these particular people's lives, so everything must conform to those new rules. And part of the fun and difficulty of writing is, What are those rules? What is the world that you're making up? Because to me what's most exciting about playwriting as opposed to writing a novel is that you get to create the entire world. You get to create the color of the furniture and the smell in the room and the clothing they wear, and then you get to see it! But all those elements must be true to your original premise: What is that world, how do you define that world. In Marisol the premise is that a guardian angel leaves the person she's guarding, and that's a big leap of faith; but it's something that a good smart theatergoer would accept. Everything must follow from that. So when I get stuck, when I'm in trouble, I know it's because I violated that initial rule.

  Hatcher: I wanted to ask you about some of the playwriting rules you do adhere to and the rules you like to break. I suppose one rule might be: Always keep the characters moving forward. Always keep track of what they want. Are there times when you say, “All right, I know the play's got to have the basic A-B-C's, but I certainly want to subvert D this time”?

  Rivera: It's hard to answer that question because I know the playwriting rules by instinct, but I don't know if I'd even be able to express what they are. I know that somehow the action must move forward and I know that the language must not obscure the ideas of the play but underline them. The rules I tend to break deal with how we experience reality, what the logic of reality is. I tend to be very free with that logic. Like in my play The Promise, the dead can come back to life. It's not unheard of that corn can bleed, for instance, which is the end of that play. I tend to break rules that way by adding elements to what we normally call reality and experience that are completely unreal, completely works of the imagination. But I don't care. They're going to be part of the reality that I represent. Those are the rules I tend to break. I don't write like a documentarian, writing life as it is, but really life as it can be imagined. Not even life as it ought to be. Because in many of the works that I've done which are works of the imagination, the worlds are pretty bleak and difficult and dire. So it's not like I'm writing an idealized world. But I am writing worlds that can be imagined—as if there were a blurring between what happens in dreams and what happens in life. Worlds in which juxtapositions are slightly more daring than they would be in a conventional play. So those are the rules that I tend to deal with. In some ways I think actually I'm a very conventional writer because my plays have a beginning,
a middle and an end most of the time. And I believe in the integrity of characters. I don't write like Sam Shepard, for instance, who creates fragments of characters or has a character basically decompose into two or three different parts. I've never done anything like that. What I do is break the rules of reality and then put that “broken” reality in the theater in a conventional form. I don't break those conventions. And even when I play with conventions, like breaking the fourth wall, I break them in a conventional way. I do it the way it's been done many times. Other kinds of rule-breaking—no plot, for example—I've never really attempted. It seems very postmodern to me. What I tend to do is to leave the larger architecture of theater more or less accessible to people and then within that to challenge their perceptions. For instance, in my play Each Day Dies With Sleep there is a young couple, just married. They're very hot for each other, they're very in love, and that is symbolized by an orange tree which they have in the house. And the orange juice itself is an aphrodisiac, and every time they want to sleep together they cut open an orange and smear orange juice on each other. Which is unconventional. I mean, it's just not something that happens in real life. The audience goes with it and says, “Oh, this is very strange.” And then what I tend to do is take that thing which is already slightly beyond the rules of the game of life and the next step. For instance, in this case the next step is that when the marriage becomes difficult and bad, those oranges turn black and the juice inside the oranges turns to gasoline, and the main character uses that gasoline to burn his house down. So it's taking something slightly unconventional and pushing it to its complete logical extreme—that the orange juice turns to gas—and, then, taking it even a step further, using that in the plot and saying that's how he burns his house down.

  Hatcher: But even that is organic.

  Rivera: Absolutely. That's completely organic.

  Hatcher: But if the orange turns into a banana which then becomes a revolver or something? That's not organic.

  Rivera: Exactly, and that kind of organic changing of the rules to me is the realism of magic realism. In Cloud Tectonics “magic” (this woman who's outside of time) and “realism” (the guy who is the baggage handler) are equal, they're married. They're a pair, and it's the juxtaposition of those two things that makes the play.

  Hatcher: I'm going to leap to another subject. Many beginning playwrights struggle with dialogue. Can good dialogue writing be taught? I think structure can be taught, if it's not instinctual, and I think you can learn about character and action and how to move a play forward. But can you learn how to write good dialogue?

  Rivera: The bad news is I would have to weigh in on the side of those who say no. When you read a lot of new plays, you can recognize the author who clearly knows how to write dialogue. That's the play that jumps out at you. And it may be a horrible play in lots of other ways, but you know instinctively this person has “it.” They have that gift. I think there is this intangible thing called talent and this intangible thing called inspiration. You can develop certain habits. You can develop skills. You can make a mediocre writer into a good writer that way and a good writer into a better writer. But I don't think you can teach the art of dialogue. The art of listening, which I think is absolutely the most important aspect of playwriting, the art of an open ear, an active ear is something I don't believe you can teach. You can teach eavesdropping, and I think you can teach people to go into the street, listen to what people are saying and write everything they've heard. But that's not theater. Theater is not a tape recorder; theater is a poetic reinterpretation of the tape recorder.

  Afterword

  When I started to write this book, two thoughts zoomed to my mind:

  1. There are lessons I've learned about playwriting over the years—truths, constants, tricks of the trade—that every writer, including me, should recall from time to time, lessons I think can be useful to other playwrights, lessons I'd like to share.

  And

  2. I'm a fraud; what could I possibly have to teach anyone?

  Writing successful plays for the theater depends on a lot of factors. In this book I've emphasized how much it depends on study and craft. But more than anything else good dramatic writing depends on a writer's heart, soul, wit, imagination, sensibility, history, travails, luck and whatever gifts she's acquired since the day she was born. It's wrong to approach a form of writing that has so much to do with personal intangibles as if it were a technical exercise that could be imitated by learning five easy steps. I didn't want this book to be a cookie-cutter manual. I wanted this book to be a reminder of the qualities and techniques all good plays possess, qualities and techniques that come either by nature or through trial and error. Every play teaches its playwright something new about his work and skills. Sometimes it's a hard lesson, sometimes it's a joyful discovery. We go two steps forward and more steps back. But we do go on.

  Sometimes the lessons have surprised me. In 1992 I wrote a four-character, one-set play called Scotland Road. Scotland Road was a mystery with a strange twist. It took place in a locked room and focused on a man obsessed by the Titanic. In this locked room he interrogates a woman who has been found floating on an iceberg in the North Atlantic. When she's rescued she says one word: “Titanic.” Apparently the woman claims to be a survivor of a disaster that took place eighty years before. The man's goal: crack her story and get her to confess she's an impostor. He has six days. In the end, the tables are turned. The woman proves she is who she says she is. The man is unmasked, and his surprising identity is revealed.

  Before I wrote the play—based on my fascination with the sinking of the Titanic and prompted by a tabloid headline I glimpsed one day in a 7–11 store (“Titanic Survivor Found on Iceberg: She Thinks It's 1912, and Her Dress Is Still Wet!”)—I knew the Titanic had an emotional pull on a lot of people, but I never knew it had its grasp on so many imaginations. I never knew that the sinking of that ship held such resonance for so many—and on the same metaphorical level as it did for me. And it was a deep satisfaction to discover that my treatment of the subject and the ideas of identity and heroism and completion struck such a chord with so many audience members.

  What, then, were the lessons I learned from Scotland Road? There were many:

  • that there was an exciting tautness my writing took on when I wrote a play with one “locked room” setting and a “ticking clock” to keep the characters moving forward;

  • that my play had a special kind of drive when the lead character's dramatic need was the strongest motivator in his life;

  • that audiences love a classic mystery, but more important, they love a mystery with a difference, a special twist and perception—call it a “gimmick”;

  • that there is a palpable sense of delight the audience feels when power shifts from one character to another;

  • that there is an emotional and intellectual lift a play can benefit from when the audience roots for its characters, no matter how bizarre or otherworldly their goals;

  • that a playwright shouldn't ignore the “big subject”; if something like the Titanic has stayed in the minds of people for almost one hundred years, there's a reason;

  • that a playwright shouldn't ignore the fact that people want to believe in the unbelievable;

  • that a playwright should never ignore his own deepest desires. I was afraid Scotland Road would be too quirky, too odd a fascination, too personal for audiences to identify with. But it turned out to be a shared obsession, and the play has been produced dozens of times. Writers can make mistakes by imagining that their own childhoods and experiences are more fascinating to the average audience member than they are, but finding the universality in something as specific as the Titanic makes these personal experiences a shared experience for the audience.

  So what did I do for my next play? Look at more tabloids? Try to find another big disaster subject? The Lusitania? The Challenger explosion? Did I fix on every little obsession I'd ever had? No. Lightning
tends not to strike twice. And many playwrights will tell you that going back to the same well more than once almost always means going back once too often. A playwright learns from success and from failure. But I think the wise playwright learns not from narrow specifics (Always write four-character plays set in locked rooms with a ticking clock) but rather from wide generalities (Find subjects an audience can care about in the same way you do; and if they don't, try to find a means of getting them to).

  Here's what I'm doing. I'm keeping my eyes open. I'm listening to the universe. I'm preparing myself to come up with the next idea.

  The best I can recommend for myself and other playwrights is this:

  Work with actors, directors, dramaturgs and designers as much as you can—at whatever level. Get involved with groups or organizations that read plays and support the work of emerging playwrights, like The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, New Dramatists in New York, and the O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. Apply to every contest. Send your plays to every theater you can think of. Give yourself time. Write. And learn.

  Learn from the plays that have come before you.

  Learn from the writing you've already done.

  Listen to the world around you.