'What's The Movement Here?'

Why, at around the start of the seventeenth century, did the term 'playwright' start to become more common than 'play-maker'? And why, given that the noun 'wright' and the other craft occupations for which it has provided a suffix have largely fallen away, has 'playwright' stuck around? On one level, the rise of print publication, linked to the new commercial playhouses, brought new attention to the play as a phenomenon that could be recorded through acts of writing. Yet the term is associated in both its first citations in the OED with Ben Jonson, and is used to describe the lesser kinds of craftsman from whom Jonson the poet wished to distinguish himself. A commendatory poem to his Sejanus declares that 'the crew j of common playwrights … are disgraced by' such a 'Tragedian'; in one of his own epigrams, he distances the wit of his 'chaste book' from the 'obscene' 'bawdry' of the playwright.¹ Writing is what you do if you are too sophisticated to be merely wrighting, but the pun suggests a common ground which a figure like Jonson will have to keep on explaining away.

In the contemporary theatre industry, the fact that playwrights are ultimately craftspeople tends to be framed as a badge of honour rather than a matter of concern – but it still brings tensions with it. Of the eighteen playwrights interviewed by Jeffrey Sweet in this collection, only Lynne Groff highlights the pun directly. Significantly, she does so in the context of her early work with the experimental New York performance ensemble Elevator Repair Service:

It wasn't that I was necessarily coming up with literal things that people would say – although sometimes that did happen, whether it was lines for myself or others to say. But the way that I consider it the beginning of my playwriting career was that I found that I really enjoyed thinking about how to put a show together. What is happening? What's the arc here? What's the movement here? Do we need another scene here? So for me it was playwriting in the 'wrought' sense of 'playwright' – making rather than dialogue writing.

(p. 216)

Groff gestures tentatively towards an expanded field of playwriting which others have attempted to theorise more fully. Having noted that 'the word "playwright" in its etymology denotes a craftsman, rather than a writer', Duška Radosavljević has proposed a framework for theatre-making led by the kind of dramaturgical questions that Groff asks, in which 'anything goes, so long as the artwork being created – text-based or not – is crafted with rigour, intelligence, intuition and attention to detail'.² Commenting on the rise of British auteur directors such as Katie Mitchell, Andrew Haydon notes that 'even aside from the obvious moments when they collaborate on creating their own written text, there is a process of wrighting a play embedded in the heart of their own directing practice'.³

Superficially, Sweet's interviews are in accord with this understanding of playwriting as a craft among other crafts. As the book's title implies, it quickly becomes impossible to talk about playwriting without highlighting how it developed from or in relation to other creative practices. Jane Anderson and Robert Schenkkan both discuss how they came to writing through acting, with Sweet proposing that in Anderson's case 'writing was an extension of the actor's function' (p. 133), and discussing the transfer of knowledge in the rehearsal room such that the actors quickly 'know more about the play' than her (p. 138). However, Anderson feels that she has 'kind of dismissed those years' as an actor (p. 134) – and it is she rather than Sweet who brings up the discussion of the writer's role in rehearsal. Groff's time with Elevator Repair Service is similarly framed as a distinct, earlier phase in her career. Most strikingly, Schenkkan's acting experience does not stop him from emphasising the authority inherent in him as a writer: he aspires...