Building Your Play: Theory and Practice for the Beginning Playwright

10. The Exposition Pig

 10 The Exposition Pig Every writer of realistic plays comes up against this problem sooner or later: How on earth do you reveal to the audience the information they need in order to understand what’s going on? Where does the action take place? Who are these people; what are their names; and what are they doing in this room? What happened in the past that makes everybody so upset? What time is it, if it matters? What actually happened at the dance that night that made Laverne commit suicide? Who is that other person that just came in? You’ll note, of course, that all of these are questions of information; and since you are well versed in writing miniplays that use QI’s, you now need to find ways in which to answer them. I use the term exposition pig when this is done badly, because the fact that you are stopping the action in order to give us this information sticks out like a big fat pig waddling through the room. I’m in debt to several of my playwriting students for the name. What are some solutions to the problem of bad exposition? Actually, there are two problems to deal with. (1) What does the audience actually need to know? And (2) how can you get it into the play gracefully? How Much Do You Need to Know? A problem often faced by beginning writers or early drafts is to decide exactly how much—and exactly what—does the audience really need to know? And in most cases, it’s surprisingly little. 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  SOME ADVANCED TRICKS Remember that plays never take place in the past; they always take place in the present, looking toward the future. Therefore, the only information we need to know is that which makes a difference to the future. Examine some famous realistic plays and note just how little you actually do know. In The Glass Menagerie, what offstage events are important enough to be onstage? All that we know about Amanda’s marriage is that she married a “telephone man who fell in love with long distance” and abandoned them. We know nothing about the kind of marriage they had, how the children were raised, or exactly what event caused him to leave. All that we know about Laura’s mishap in business school is that she threw up and stopped going. All that we know about Amanda’s childhood is that she had lots of gentlemen callers and collected jonquils one summer. We don’t know a whole lot—because nothing else is important. Similarly, in Othello, we know very little about the past: • somehow Cassio got promoted before Iago; • somehow Iago made a deal with Roderigo about Desdemona; • somehow Othello was able to woo and win Desdemona; • for some reason, Cassio can’t hold his liquor; • at some time in the past, Cassio fooled around with a woman named Bianca; • at some point in the past, Othello gave Desdemona a handkerchief. What do we not know? We know nothing about how Othello got to be a general; why and how he came to trust Iago; why he promoted Cassio first; what kind of childhood Othello had; why he would marry outside his race; why the Duke trusts him so. We know that later Othello gets called back to Venice, but we never know exactly why. We have no clue about the kind of soldier Iago was; why he lost the promotion; how he met and married Emilia; why Emilia puts up with him; how Cassio met Bianca; what happened in the battle that Othello seems to have won; and so forth. In short, both Williams and Shakespeare give us just enough to understand what’s going on, and no more. Of course, there are 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  THE EXPOSITION PIG other plays in which we get a great deal of the past. In A Doll’s House, for instance, we need to know all of the details of Nora’s marriage to Torvald; exactly what Torvald does for a living; precisely what it was Nora did that makes her susceptible to blackmail ; who the various men in her life are and where they come from; and what sort of friendship Mrs. Linde has with Nora. This is because Ibsen, in this play, is dealing with the traps that society lays for us. He...