How to Write a Play

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY (in which i am really telling myself how, but if you are the right one i am telling you how, too) Richard Foreman make a kind of beauty that isn't an ALTERNATIVE to a certain environment (beauty, adventure, romance, dream, drama all take you out of your real world and into their own in the hope you'll return refreshed, wiser, more compassionate, etc.) but rather makes GAPS in the non-beautiful, or look carefully at the structure of the non-beautiful, whatever it is (and remember that structure is always a combination of the THING and the PERCEIVING of it) and see where there are small points, gaps, unarticulated or un-mapped places within it (the non-beautiful) which un-mapped places must be the very places where beauty CAN be planted in the midst of the heretofore unbeautiful. Because the mind's PROJECTED beauty (which is the only beauty ). . . can either find itself in the already beautiful (so agreed upon) or it can MAKE Conquer new territories. But: while in the midst of the heretofore still un-redeemed "non-beautiful" the projection of the will-tobeauty can either be a pure act of will in which there is a pure, 84 willed reversal of values (which can have great strategic value but creates art that DOES tend to "wear out"-not, you understand, a negative judgement ) or our method, find the heretofore un-mapped, un-notated crevices in the not-yet-beautiful landscape (which is a collaboration between perceiving mind and world) and widen the gaps and plant the seed in those gaps and make those gaps flower . . . and the plant over-runs the entire landscape. What this amounts to is a DECISION to view non-beautiful material in such a way that what was foreground is now background. . and the desired beauty is then projected, as the creative act, into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, cliched, etc.). Delight is delight. It aims us to whatever it is that delights us. Can we make a more CONTROLLED use of that energy of "beingaimed " by willfully choosing to have a certain object be the one which arouses that delight-energy? ANY object? Of course. That's the task-discover how to be in control, how to CHOOSE. which object shall provoke the delight phenomenon (and so increase that per-centage of the world we can say "yes" to, and thereby gain an inexhaustible fund of "delight-fuel") Here's how. Normally, let us assume we are delighted by a sunset We are not delighted by a corpse. But if we place the corpse within a certain composition, let us say-we are then delighted by the composition of which the corpse is a part. So-while we are still not delighted by a corpse, we can be delighted by something (made or found) of which the corpse is a part. The task of art is to find what heretofore does not delight us, and make that part ofsome kind of composition in such a way that delight results. Now, the composition need not be a composition in the expected 85 sense, that is, need not be something that is defined or defines the artwork itselfThe composition may be any "context" in which the material is placed. In much art today, for instance, the context-composition is "the inherited history of Western art." So that the reason a minimalist gesture such as a Morris black box is "delightful" is because we understand it as an intelligent next move chosen in the context of an evolving "game" which has been the game (move and countermove) of Western art. So in the theatre, which is always behind the times, one must ask "ah-what can we include in the on-going context composition which heretofore has been de-valued and kept out, etc., etc., and few people in the theatre ask that question and do that thing and so the theatre is rarely art, and when it is it creates problems for itself since its audience is not an audience interested in art but in entertainment. Which means, its audience is...