Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation

6. Craft Playable Actions

105 6 ✦ Building Block Six Craft Playable Actions Theater is doing. It lives and moves in real time, and things have to happen during that time for your play to be theater. Earlier chapters have touched on the need for actions in your script, and chapter 5 in particular explored the necessity of adding action to storyline. An action is what happens, the actual physical occurrence that defines the central event of a scene or your play. A series of such actions carries your story forward. This chapter will focus on defining an action and pointing you toward crafting a script that relies on this essential theatrical element. Just as all the building blocks work together, intersect, and feed one another, the three performance vocabularies of language, image, and movement actually overlap and support each other in their work of communicating meaning. Language conveys an action when it is revelatory, when, at that present moment of speaking, it uncovers what someone wants. Playable events involving costumes, props, lights, sound, and the scenic environment allow an evocative stageable image to effect an action. And actors’ physical or vocal playing choices that reveal their internal changes of emotion or shifts in their relationships are pure, straightforward theatrical actions. Language as Action In life we use a lot of words, sounds, stock phrases, and tangled eloquence before we get to the point. In contrast, the best words onstage have an economy and direct specificity. Such language is action when the words a character speaks change the course of the story. Often such a linguistic action takes us by surprise or, conversely, answers a question to which everyone has been waiting for an answer. When someone 106 Building Block Six announces his or her candidacy for mayor or withdraws from the race, either is an action. When a child says, “I’m running away,” or a friend tells a lie to spread a rumor, each is an action. When someone says “I love you” for the first time, or “I don’t love you anymore,” delivering this news is an action. It changes the behavior of the characters in the scene. Many of the significant events we encounter as human beings we experience through language—it is the medium through which we receive many of the gifts, blows, discoveries, and challenges that life has to offer. So scenes onstage reflect this language-mediated human experience , and great actors are beautifully adept at making these moments of action clear. The physical and vocal buildup to both delivering and receiving these central-event lines between actors makes them the powerful moments that we remember from a play. One of the clearest examples of spoken language as a character’s action is a vow. When someone commits with certainty to a significant course of action that he or she has been considering, it is the utterance of that fact that makes it real and communicates it both to any other characters onstage and to the audience. Sometimes it is news to the character as well. Example of Language as Action from Hamlet Brooding, grief-bound, “melting” Hamlet turns into a man of moves after he discovers that his father was murdered. GHOST: If thou didst ever thy dear father love— HAMLET: O God! GHOST: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. HAMLET: Murder! GHOST: Murder most foul, as in best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural. HAMLET: Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift as meditation, or thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge. (I, V) Hamlet answers the demand of his dead, militaristic father with the linguistic action of pledging, in the final line of this passage, to avenge his father’s murder. At this moment, vengeance becomes his superobjective for the play, and all his actions follow this need. Playable Actions 107 Example of Language as Action from The Cockfighter A significant action in The Cockfighter is Sonny’s exclaiming, “Fight it out!” He puts his beloved and wounded pet Lion back in the ring to fight to the death. The buildup to Sonny’s choice occurs as Homer tries to concede the fight and save Lion for the boy, while the father counts off and insists that it is in the nature of a cock to kill or be killed. FATHER: (Coming up.) What’s going on here? What? Hell, no! Fight it out...