Building Your Play: Theory and Practice for the Beginning Playwright

1. Is It a Play?

 1 Is It a Play? Where do we begin? The first thing we need to do is understand what exactly it is we’re creating here. We’re not creating a novel, a film, a painting, a poem, or even a short story. A play is a unique art form and has important features. So where do you start? You can start in any number of places. You know an interesting story you think would be stageworthy. You know a weird and complex person you think might make a good character. You feel strongly about a social issue and want to change the body politic. Or you had a bizarre dream last night you want to translate to the stage. However, as intriguing as these brain-seeds might be, not all of them have the potential to be a play. So, let’s start by defining what a play is and note how it differs from other forms of storytelling. An Operating Definition We can begin by defining a play as “something that happens to a person.” A good start, but not everything that happens to a person has the makings of a drama. We need something more specific. It might be useful as a beginning to point out that a play is not the same thing as a story. A play may (and often does) contain within it a story, but not every story can make a play. I can best explain this by borrowing from a work by Henry James called The Art of Fiction and elaborating a little on his theory. Suppose I tell you the following two statements: 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  THE FUNDAMENTALS 1. The king died. 2. The queen died. What do I have? I have a collection of facts.Two things happened. True. But that’s all. Now, suppose I gave you these two statements: 1. The king died. 2. Two weeks later, the queen died. What do I have now? I have history; that is, a chronological sequence of events in which one follows another in time. Now, suppose I give you these two statements: 1. The king died. 2. Two weeks later, the queen died of grief. What do I have now? Now I have, at last, a story; that is, a series of events that are causally connected and that, as a whole, relate a larger event that has coherence and meaning. So there’s a story involved here: of two people, royalty, who are so much in love that even death won’t separate them. But now, suppose I give you this statement: “Guess what? The cook told me that the upstairs maid told her that the butler found the queen hanging from her chandelier with a note attached to her big toe that said, ‘I cannot live without Henry, and I’m going to join him!’” Now what do I have? I have the way in which the story is communicated. How the story is told. In what form it is revealed to the audience. And this last statement is the one that makes the play. In other words, a play is a form of communication (or art) in which a story is revealed. In this case, the play would consist of a dialogue between two people: say, a footman who speaks the above line and a butler who listens. The play itself concerns the relationship between the footman and the butler, the reasons the footman tells the story, and other interesting angles, but the story of the king and queen gets told. Of course, there might be other ways to tell the same story—other sorts of “plays.” The story might be told to us by a news anchor on the ten o’clock news, in which case the play 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  IS IT A PLAY? concerns the anchor and his or her reading. Or the story might be told to us by somebody who reads to somebody else the long, last letter the queen actually wrote, and the play concerns the reader and the reader’s audience. Or the story might be told to us directly; that is, we might actually see the events take place in front of us: the queen nursing the sick man, his death and burial, her despair, her writing the note, tying the rope, and jumping off the table. In this case, the...