Struggle with Play Structure
Struggling with the structure of plays. Have exhausted myself creating them without conscious awareness of the structure, that is, the historic structural questions.
| Picked up Poetics and have started that. Reading a history of the theatre, as well. I have a great book on Ibsen entitled Ibsen’s Workshop, which shows his notes, scenarios, drafts of plays, all of which you can compare to the final published plays. The additions to A Doll’s House are quite telling of his process, the fleshing out of his characters from a skeletal beginning.
This is the process I used for my play The Empiric. Unfortunately, per the first sentence or two, I was ignorant of the process and was adivsed to use it by my professor, Mike Geither, who is an excellent playwright. Mike, however, uses a method of discovery and writing that is at the opposite pole from my own: I being much more plot oriented. So, I will begin at the beginning, with Aristotle, and work through. I have read William Archer as well, an interesting book on playwrighting and drama. Just finished a 1958 article by Arthur Miller entitled, “The Shadow of the Gods,” from Harpers. I will move on to a Theory of the Modern Stage and Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd. The most important thing, I guess, is to keep writing. Plenty of ideas… |
