The Writing of Plays

One of the many unpaid but arts-related things I am doing as a bohemian in suburbia is reading script submissions for a theatre in DC. So far I’ve read only one script, but I read it a lot, because I wanted to be sure not to a) throw away the next Angels in America or b) waste my supervisor’s time because I was too polite to be honest. Already I feel like I’m getting a bit of an education in playwriting. Like many of us, I suspect, I have my own eternally gestating only semi-autobiographical play that I pretend I will someday write (which was developed mainly in college while not paying attention in class), and I felt a surprising sympathy with the author of this play (who I will call M), despite her semi-rude cover letter (addressed “Dear Whomever”) and the work’s obvious flaws.

For some reason I expected to be cold-blooded, cruelly analytical and highly critical, searching for evidence that I am a better writer than most of the world. (Please tell me that’s how most of us read unpublished writing.) But instead I found myself touched by M’s ambition. Her play is a family drama set on one day in the1940s, framed by the main character as an older woman looking back. In a monologue at the beginning of the show, the narrator has some lovely lines about memory, and the stage directions ask that the lighting mimic the effect of thoughts swirling around the mind. My embryo of a play uses a similar device—it’s in memory, framed by one character’s reflections—and I’m pretty sure I came up with that idea because I just didn’t know how to start. I didn’t know why it was important to tell the story, or even maybe what exactly the story was, so I decided to push that responsibility off onto this poor character. I’d find some reason the story was important to her, and that would carry the weight of justifying the existence of the play as a whole.

The problem in M’s script, however, was that her play ultimately didn’t have anything to do with memory, and the narrator character seemed to have acquired no wisdom in the fifty years that had elapsed since her experience as a young woman. She served mostly as a voiceover of her younger self’s thoughts, albeit with a slightly indulgent, removed tone. She made no mention of a secret family illness brought up in the past-day plotline, nor did she really reflect on the choices she made as a young woman. It seemed silly to have the framing device at all, since it didn’t add any depth to the story.

But the greater danger, I realized, is not that you’ll include an unnecessary style element, but that you’ll be tempted to express in the narration (or voiceover) whatever you’re trying to say—what you want to write a play about—without your play necessarily living up to those promises. M’s play never really got anywhere, even though its dialogue was often entertaining and I was sometimes swept up in the characters. Ultimately it didn’t explore a theme, or come down on either side of a question. What was expressed in the monologues was never really expressed in the dialogue and the action of the greater play. That is the harder trick, I think—to somehow make your characters tell the story, and not by saying, “This is the story.” In Translations, Hugh articulates some of the themes of the play, but his proclamations are in keeping with his pedantic nature, mocked by some of the other characters, and supported by the overall action.

Another difference between experienced playwrights and people like me and M is that the professionals seem to feel less necessity to dictate every moment. (I’m generalizing here, of course; some well-known playwrights are outrageously specific with their stage directions, like Eugene O’Neill, or Frederick Knott, who wrote Wait Until Dark and seemed to think actors had no ability to interpret any but the most straightforward lines). Again, I sympathized with M on this. I definitely understand the impulse of, “I see it in my head, I want to describe it so that the director makes it happen exactly like that.” Ultimately, though, if you’re writing something that doesn’t leave any room for interpretation by other artists (actors, directors, designers), you’re writing a novel. What amazes me about great playwrights is how they learn to tread that line. Write something incredibly specific and evocative, so it’s inspiring to other artists—they have some idea of what to do with it—and yet something that leaves room for them to do what they do. Or, to phrase it more concretely, it’s learning to tell stories mainly through dialogue, which seems like a skill set totally different from telling stories through pictures, as in a screenplay, or through inner thoughts/narration, as in a novel.

Obviously, there’s a craft involved with any work of art, and there’s plenty of writing, amateur and professional, that would be vastly improved with a more rigorous edit. Maybe one rule of thumb should be to tell your story as simply and concisely as possible, at least as an exercise, to make sure there really is a story underlying whatever fancy stylistic trappings you dress it up in. (Another favourite fantasy of mine is to allow key plot points to emerge through dance, my personal substitute for the movie montage; really just an excuse to be lazy about writing the scene itself.)

But ultimately, I think part of what makes a great work of art is ambition and a willingness to risk overreaching. Every time I read Angels in America, I am astonished at Tony Kushner’s creative audacity. Putting God on trial? Roy Cohn haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg? Talking Mormons in the diorama? Outrageous! But a masterpiece. Thank god he never said no to himself, I always think. On the other hand, he had something to say that was huge and powerful enough to justify his 6-hour two-part epic. And that, I suspect, is the other half of the battle. As one of my teachers might say, you have to develop a huge soul along with a huge craft.