The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  It's a trick—one the audience plays along with. The audience allows for an acceleration of action as part of the suspension of disbelief. As long as the compression of time is not too accelerated—so accelerated as to appear ridiculous—the action of the play will not seem to rush by at too rapid a pace. The audience wants the playwright to cut out the dull bits. Fifty-five minutes of onstage action can seem to represent an entire dinner party (Blue Window) or a stockholders' meeting (Jon Robin Baitz's The Substance of Fire) or a political debate (David Hare's A Map of the World), all of which are events that would take hours to enact in real life. What the playwright must keep in mind, however, is that no matter how willing the audience is to suspend its disbelief, they do expect the shape of the scene to follow the shape of the real event. The cocktail party may take only minutes, but it had better follow the form of introductions, offers of drinks, refills and the like. The courtroom battle may not take months to play out as it does in real life, but the audience expects to see the opening arguments, the questioning, the cross examinations, the summations and the verdict. The stockholders' meeting may be over in moments, but the audience wants to know who owns what percentages, what is at stake, who's on whose side and they want to see the vote at the end.

  A five-second pause onstage feels like an eternity. Time elongates onstage, so playwrights are always compressing action. Since Shakespeare's time, audiences have been well acquainted with the notion of a scene beginning “five months later,” or in Ibsen's day, “the next morning,” or in the comedies of the 1930s, “a few minutes later.” Audiences can make that leap and make it comfortably. And, as in scenes that take place in multiple settings on the same stage, time can be fluid onstage. A character may go back in time or forward. A character may relive a past moment in the present. Historical events may hurry by in seconds. The audience's contract with the stage allows all this and more.

  The greatest danger onstage is that time may seem longer than it really is. In most cases the playwright doesn't want an audience to think they've been in the theater longer than they have. We all know what it means when someone says that a thirty-five-minute first act “seemed to go on forever.” It means not enough happened. There weren't enough actions, followed by reactions, followed in turn by new actions to hold the audience's interest. That's how time elongates. If the actions are moving forward and the suspense is properly generated, the hours pass like minutes.

  So, in this question of time, the key points to remember are these:

  • Require only those dynamic actions that are absolutely necessary.

  • Know that audiences love the completeness of a Time = Time play.

  • Know that they also love nonrealistic, fluid, theatricalized stage time.

  • Audiences “agree” to the artificial compression of action and time.

  • Onstage, thirty seconds of nothing is an eternity.

  CAUSALITY

  Causality is an entirely dramatic concept, not a theatrical one. Causality refers to why events or actions occur. But when I say “why,” I don't necessarily refer to a twentieth-century psychological concept of “why.” In this context “why” means “what actions cause other actions to take place?” It's a question of dramatic dynamics, of falling dominoes. Causality is closely related to the dramatic concepts of goals, obstacles and linkage. To more fully understand this linkage of actions, let's examine a situation established in a play and find its dynamic causal relationships. The causal relationship is directly connected to the idea of goals, obstacles and actions.

  In The Changeling, a seventeenth-century Jacobean revenge tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, we meet Beatrice, engaged to Alonzo but in love with his younger brother Tomazo.

  Goal: Tomazo and Beatrice are in love with each other and wish to marry.

  Obstacle: Beatrice is betrothed to Tomazo's brother, Alonzo.

  Solution action: Beatrice and Tomazo plot to kill Alonzo.

  Further obstacle: Neither can perform the murder without courting suspicion.

  Solution action: They hire DeFlores, Beatrice's servant, to kill the brother.

  Further obstacle: DeFlores will only commit the murder if Beatrice allows him to have intercourse with her after the murder.

  Solution action: Beatrice acquiesces to DeFlores' wish.

  Action: DeFlores murders Alonzo.

  Payoff: Beatrice allows DeFlores to make love to her.

  Complication: After having sex with DeFlores, Beatrice falls in love with him.

  … and then the play gets really interesting.

  Can you track the causal effects, the falling dominoes? Experiment with causality. Track the plot of Hamlet and change an action performed by Hamlet, by Gertrude, by Polonius, by Claudius. Change one of their actions and the play changes. It no longer runs on toward the famous climax we all remember. See how unsatisfying those alternate actions and conclusions are when you change them.

  Make sure the causal actions in your play link up. Nothing frustrates and infuriates an audience more than to follow a play and miss an important step. An audience can sense a playwright trying to patch together actions that were never meant to join. That's what makes them ask the question, Why did that happen?

  Do yourself a favor. Be like the child who constantly tugs at his parent's hand asking over and over again, “Why?”

  So, in this question of causality, the key points to remember are these:

  • Require only those dynamic actions that are absolutely necessary (just as you did with “time”); skip the unimportant actions.

  • Remember that audiences hate it when playwrights skip essential causal steps.

  • Always make your actions link.

  • Track your actions from the beginning of the play to its end, and vice versa.

  • Focus the linkage of events on the constant exchange of your character's goals, obstacles and actions. Of every action ask the question, Why?

  And always pull out Immanuel Kant at a cocktail party.

  EXERCISES

  1. Select an event that either happened to you or that you caused to happen. Make it an event you know well, one that contains human dramatic conflict. Understand its setting: Did it take place in one space or many spaces? Understand its time frame: Did it take place in one continuous length of time, or did it take many hours, days or more? What caused the event to come about? What action did you perform? What happened after? Write down the key factors in the event.

  2. Now imagine the scene onstage. What do you need to show the event? Start with space. What is the fully realistic version of the set? What is the suggestive version? What is the version that needs only dialogue to depict its setting? Write down your conclusions.

  3. Next, focus on time. Do you show the event in Time = Time? Or do you compress time? Will you show the event in a series of scenes? Will you go backward and forward in time? Will different depicted time frames exist onstage in the same stage time? Experiment with all the possibilities. Take a dramatic situation of conflict and write the same scene in at least three different ways: (a) Time = Time, (b) compressed time, and (c) multiple time frames.

  4. Find the causal links in the action. If the central action was your decision to run away from home at the age of ten, find the links that run backward and forward from this action. Why did you run away? And what happened after you ran? Using the model from The Changeling, list the problems, solutions, actions and reactions until you have found the starting point and the concluding point of the central action.

  5. “Five places in four pages.” The stage is bare. You have one to five characters at your disposal. In four pages, take your audience to five completely different locations. You may use one hand prop or rolling piece of scenery (grocery cart, toy wagon, wheelchair, etc.) per location to help suggest the scene. You get extra points if you use no props or scenery, depending entirely on dialogue.

  6. “Five time periods in four pages.” The stage is still bare
. You have one to five characters at your disposal. In four pages, take your audience to five completely different time periods. You may use one hand prop or costume per place to help suggest the time. Again, you get extra points if you use no props or scenery, depending entirely on dialogue.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Getting the Great Idea and Turning It Into a Play

  People always ask playwrights, “Where do you get your ideas for your plays?” The simple truth is that there's no rule of thumb for getting play ideas. Writers get play ideas from history, from current events, from overheard anecdotes and from personal experience. They have to keep their artistic antennae up to pick up signals from their world and their own concerns. It's not the quality of the idea that makes a good play, it's the quality of the dramatization of the idea. Still, there are a few guidelines you might consider when you're rummaging around whatever psychic box you keep in the basement for your ideas. Here are a few:

  • A play idea that suggests conflict is better than one that doesn't. “My mother's funeral” is a play idea. It suggests a situation, but it doesn't suggest dramatic conflict. However, “Two daughters battle over an estate at their mother's funeral” suggests both situation and conflict.

  • A play idea that suggests a journey of change on the part of its characters is better than one that doesn't. “Two daughters battle over an estate at their mother's funeral” suggests situation and conflict. But “Two daughters battle over an estate at their mother's funeral, resulting in one of them deciding to leave her loveless marriage” suggests situation, conflict and journey.

  • A play idea that suggests theatricality is better than one that doesn't. “Two daughters battle over an estate at their mother's funeral, resulting in one of them deciding to leave her loveless marriage” suggests situation, conflict and journey. But “Two daughters battle over an estate at their mother's funeral, resulting in one of them deciding to leave her loveless marriage when the ghost of the mother speaks to them from her coffin” suggests situation, conflict, journey and theatricality.

  The real gold in a good idea is seldom found in the initial spark. It's found in the dramatist's development of the idea. Of course, there are some play ideas that lend themselves to successful development more readily than others, like Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, about the rivalry between the composers Mozart and Salieri. The play was based on historical fact and on the famous rumor that Salieri had poisoned Mozart. The situation (the existence of Mozart and Salieri in Vienna in the eighteenth century), conflict (two composers vying for power in the same court), journey (Salieri's movement from complacency to envy) and theatricality (music, costumes, etc.) all rose organically from Shaffer's initial idea. But a good play can come from any idea. As a dramatist you have to cultivate a nose for recognizing an idea's potential for development as absorbing drama and exciting theater.

  There is such a thing as subject matter that, by its very nature, is more intriguing than others. David Mamet's powerful and highly controversial Oleanna is gripping, in large part, because of its subject matter (political correctness, sexual harassment, the battle between men and women). Oleanna was written and produced right after the Supreme Court confirmation hearings involving Judge Clarence Thomas and his former assistant Anita Hill. The subject already had the nation in thrall, and then along came Oleanna to capitalize on it. Oleanna was produced all over the world. It is one of Mamet's most successful—and divisive—plays. But during that same period, there were lots of plays written on the subject of political correctness, sexual harassment, and the battle between men and women. The majority of them were bad. The difference lies in Mamet's talent, in his treatment and development of the idea. Subject matter can only take an audience so far. A play about uncovering the identity of Jack the Ripper will grab an audience even before the lights go down in the theater. But after that initial adrenalin jolt, powerful subject matter must earn its grip on an audience. Once the playwright has hooked the audience, the play itself, not the subject, must carry it through.

  Playwrights get their ideas for plays from many different sources:

  • From history: Shakespeare's tragedies and histories came from earlier chronicles and sometimes earlier plays. Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons came from the sixteenth-century histories of Sir Thomas More and his battle with Henry VIII. Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois is based, in part, on the record of Lincoln's early court cases.

  • From contemporary news stories: John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation came from an article about a scam in The New York Times. Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods came from reports of an unofficial meeting between U.S. and Soviet arms negotiators in Switzerland. And Anna Deavere Smith's monodrama Fires in the Mirror came from the media coverage of the Crown Heights incidents.

  • From their work and surroundings: Ben Hecht and Charles Mac Arthur got The Front Page from their experience as newspapermen. David Mamet recalled his time working in a questionable real estate office to write Glengarry Glen Ross. Willy Russell's Educating Rita came from his own background as a hairdresser and night-school student.

  • From their thoughts about politics and society: Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine and Mad Forest reflect her concerns with, respectively, sexual/gender politics and the Rumanian revolution. Tony Kushner's Angels in America, William Hoffman's As Is, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey are all derived from the playwrights' concerns regarding the AIDS crisis. And Arthur Miller's The Crucible, although based on the Salem witch-hunts of the seventeenth century, was his notable response to the 1950s McCarthy witch-hunts.

  • From themselves, their families and friends: Hedda Gabler is based on a number of people in Henrik Ibsen's wide circle of friends and contemporaries. The Odd Couple came from Neil Simon's recollection of visiting the apartment of his fastidious brother Danny and Danny's sloppy room-mate Roy. Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy was based on his memory of his white grandmother and her black chauffeur.

  The idea for the play could have come from a premise, a moral, a message; it may have come from an anecdote; it may have come from a person; or it may even have come from an overheard conversation or an imagined scene, a preoccupation or obsession.

  At the end of this chapter you'll find a few exercises concerning how to find and develop play ideas. For now, remember that your play idea can come from any number of sources. In fact, the great idea for your play will probably come from a combination of sources; the best play ideas always do. But if the initial idea for the play doesn't lend itself to conflict, journeys and theatricality—indeed to all of Aristotle's six elements—something essential will be missing. And if the idea doesn't connect directly with you, it probably won't connect with an audience. You always need to find the person inside your play.

  I learned this playwright's lesson the hard way. My first two full-length plays were comedies. They were funny. They contained ideas. But I hadn't thought about the person inside the play. There was no “me” in my first two (unproduced) plays. The person inside the play is always the writer.

  Your play, no matter its source or influence, must spring from a feeling or belief that you value deeply, be the play a searing political statement or a rollicking comedy. Sometimes the connection will appear obvious to you. If you go to your grandmother's funeral and you witness your mother and your aunt arguing over their inheritance, the familial strife—that complicated combination of love, resentment, memories and need—may be so palpable that when you sit down to write the play you're fully conscious of the connection you've made between the idea and yourself. Sometimes the connection is unconscious. Many playwrights talk about the magnetic pull some ideas have for them, realizing only after they've written the play how connected the idea was to one of their own deeply held concerns. Your first step in developing the right ideas for your plays should be to find out what topics and subjects interest you.

  When your dramatic skill unites with an idea that has meaning for you, somethin
g breaks through. My breakthrough came during a long weekend in 1986 when I was visiting the home of a woman I'd known in college. Her father was the headmaster of a private school outside New York. Friday night there was a cocktail party with faculty members and parents. Saturday morning I rose early and made coffee in the kitchen. There was a rattle at the back door. I looked out and saw a figure in a worker's smock emptying the garbage. I recognized the man's face, but I couldn't place it. Something was out of context.

  My friend's mother came into the kitchen. “Who's that?” I asked. “Oh, that's Ashton,” she said. “You met him last night.”

  Ashton was a teacher at the school, a charming man with no independent income of his own. He had been married many times, and his alimony was “killing him.” Because he made so little money, Ashton had been forced to take on additional jobs to make ends meet. At first he'd kept these jobs a secret, but one night the headmaster and his wife had gone to a party in a nearby town and discovered Ashton working as a bartender. Since then Ashton's moonlighting had become known to his colleagues and students, and they accepted his odd jobs as just another part of his life. But I noticed that the headmaster's wife did not attempt to greet Ashton, nor did he knock on the back door, although it was obvious we were inside. There had been a mutual, unstated agreement that when Ashton was at school, he was part of the group—a peer—but when he was doing one of his odd jobs, in his gray smock and gloves, he was invisible.