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Per Jonah’s podcast, number 1.1: “Theatrical–of or for the theater of acting or actors; calculated for effect, showy, artificial, affected.”

In chapter two of Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically, Michael Wright considers theatricality and the flaws of current approaches to teaching playwriting and deficiencies he often sees in plays created by new playwrights.

In his Theatrically Speaking series of podcasts, Jonah Knight started with podcast 1.1 and 1.2 by considering theatricality.

I think the fact that both of these playwrights have started their works by looking at theater through the lens of theatricality is telling. That is, it must be important. There must be something about it that demands or merits attention. And on my part, theatricality has been the most difficult and elusive of elements and only recently have I started to get my hands on it or my head around it.

My Take on Theatricality

To me, writing theatricality means grasping space as you write. It means apprehending not only the characters and events that you mean to portray, but the physical environment in which they exist; how that physical environment affects your characters and events”and then using this apprehension creatively to your advantage”or more specifically, passing the three-dimensional world of the play that you are creating on to the audience and thereby making that world actively interesting, engaging, and unique to the meaning and content of your play.

In my play A Howl in the Woods one of the characters is in a bad position”he’s trapped in a place where he doesn’t want to be (physically, psychologically, and spiritually)”throughout the first part of the play trash has been thrown about and has covered the ground: including beer cans. It came to me suddenly that this character could flatten a beer can and use it to construct a mock telegraph machine and use it to send a message”and then it hit me next: what if he got an answer? What if that answer were a howl from off stage? A presence that kept encroaching? This, to me is theatricality. In this scene, the character is having a dialogue with himself; his behavior is telling: it shows his state of mind and the mock telegraph makes tangible his struggle to get out; it holds mystery; it reveals his imaginative nature and experiments with the space he occupies.

Before I wrote this play, the extent of my theatrical sense of a stage was limited to people crossing up and down and from side-to-side and motioning and, occasionally, singing something as they puttered around. That is, this was my physical sense of the play. I have always had a good verbal sense; and my plays are highly imagistic and carry meaningful metaphors and themes. This is to say that language is important, too. As is emotion. Getting that sense of what a character is all about by seeing that character move in space, seeing that character break a vase, weep in deep sobs, tackle another person. Theatricality is realizing all the elements of emotional characters; using all the elements at your disposal: language, physicality of action, physicality of expression, etc.

Not Thinking Theatrically

In his book, Wright begins his first chapter by writing that: “One of the most interesting teaching challenges I’ve experienced is dealing with a student population that does not innately think ‘theatrically.’ And Jonah discusses this in podcast 1.2 where he describes a reading in which the characters just sit around and play trashcan basketball. That nothing happens. Nothing in the dialogue refers to what they’re doing (playing trashcan basketball). It, in fact, has no relation to the scene. This, to my mind, makes the activity spectacle”and poor spectacle at that. That is to say, the activity doesn’t advance the plot, it doesn’t expand our understanding of the characters; it doesn’t reflect on the meaning of the play in any symbolic or metaphorical sense. It is just something that for some reason the playwright thought was “active.”

Wright offers two solutions to overcome this state of not thinking theatrically: read more plays, and write as much as possible. The writing, he insists, will force the young playwrights to experience the challenges of creating and overcoming obstacles in the creation process.

A Representation of Potential

One of the things that I like about what Wright says is that:

“a stage is always a physical representation of potential. The stage is a space that contains possibilities, not realities: it is a place for imaging “In itself a stage is theatrical. Even empty, it’s a kind of show because the imagination is engaged by it. In use, there is no limit to what can happen there, unless the imagination itself is limited.”

I think Jonah makes a good point on this as well. He talks of an exercise that he once experienced that asked playwrights to figure out something that could not happen on a stage. Jonah’s idea was “the sky falls down.” He talks about moving the stage; doing it with lighting, etc.

I think what is important is what Wright says at the end of the quote above”unless the imagination itself is limited,” so the real challenge is to break out of your own style and always explore, always challenge yourself, always think and push what is possible: what’s going on here? How can it be different? How can I look at this situation differently? How can I show what is happening and not have people talk about it?

Children’s Theatre as an example

One of the things Wright points to is children’s theatre. That several things happen in children’s theatre: 1) it is usually done on a limited budget so things have to be imagined; 2) children are expected to participate in the act of creating”not just to sit passively and watch.

This doesn’t mean that you have to have your audience help create the play”although, as I pointed out in my podcast appearance on Theatrically Speaking, in people’s theater it is one approach to play generation. But more practically it means always be open to the possibility that any scene holds for you. How can you look at the scene differently? How can you evolve it using what is already there? What haven’t you explored in a given scene? In its setting? What is available to you if you act imaginatively?

As I mentioned in my recent posts, I was given a gracious opportunity by Jonah Knight to speak on his program Theatrically Speaking–for which I am grateful. The topic I discussed was playwriting process and I looked over the breadth of my experience, which has moved from a formal pursuit of the “well-made” play; into the fearful vagaries of just letting images and ideas swell up from the unconscious and surround a set of characters or actions or spaces. In doing the podcast I found that I was hedging against a diatribe and I still feel somewhat that I should avoid doing so outright. However, the more I think about the subject of playwriting process and the more I look at what others say about it, the more I’m convinced that I have moved onto a solid path: one that will guide my future steps. I have just picked up the book Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically, and I have a feeling that I will very much enjoy it. The author, Michael Wright promises a litany of exercises to explore the various aspects of playwriting, and, as I’m always anxious to explore, I will take them up and later comment on them: including which I have found effective, not so much, and, of course, what they did for my awareness and experience of process. Wright’s introduction is very encouraging to my mind. He begins by stating that,

“…this book does not follow any kind of formulaic approach to the making of a play. It’s my belief that formulas impose an inhibitive sense of style and limited theatrical thinking on a writer.”

This is far better articulated than what I managed in my podcast, where I resorted to strange metaphors and comments to the effect that making plays is not like making cakes: that is, there’s no recipe that you can follow: a dash of tension here, and teaspoon of spectacle there: here 3 cups of exposition. Now, I don’t want to imply that just anyone can make a cake either…there is art to most everything that is done conscientiously, tirelessly over time, and well. In my podcast I say that this approach to writing,

“tended to produce plays or create plays that often seemed to be very similar to one another, not necessarily in their content, but in the way that they moved and in their rhythm and in the way that they felt…”

And I think Wright’s diagnosis of the problem is accurate: namely, that there is “an inhibitive sense of style and limited theatrical thinking…” and, perhaps, I was inhibited and limited in the same way all the time, so that my plays were constricted and lacking always in the same way…thus giving them the same feeling or quality that I describe above.

Wright later states that, “Playwriting is an art even though we refer to it as a craft; the latter implies that playwrights simply become apprenticed and five years later have achieved playwright status.” Despite the truth of his comment, I have to state that I would love to be apprenticed to a master playwright and spend five years in such a manner as, say, a printmaker would have in 1778, or a shipwright or whatever. I think there is great value in such an arrangement and I wholly believe that the knowledge of the tools and the forms and constructions, etc., would be invaluable. This is not to say, as Wright justly points out, that having done this one would achieve ‘playwright status.’ But, one would go a long way toward it. I believe, still, with growing certainty, that dropping inhibitions and exploring the different components in a free form of writing would be necessary to making that jump to the status of a successful playwright–and I don’t mean commercially, but personally and artistically: that is, satisfying yourself, exploring yourself, and at the same time creating meanings that truly connect with others and add value to their understanding of both themselves and the world we all live in–limited as my Western perspective on that would be.

Wright writes (I have to say that again and again) that,

“Watching master playwrights struggle with their latest plays would be a great training ground. We could learn by watching how they make decisions about plot, which structure to place the plot in, how late to get into the action of the play, and how much needs to be known about their characters.”

Interestingly enough, I have a book entitled “From Ibsen’s Workshop” which takes the approach of gathering up all known copies of his notes and drafts and then assimilating them and then comparing them with the final versions of the play–so that you can see, for instance, how Nora changes in earlier versions to the final version of A Doll’s House. (It also provides the interesting note that in Germany whoever staged the play forced Ibsen to change the ending so that Nora didn’t leave, saying, instead, something to the effect, “Oh, I could never leave my children.” and then collapsing at the door to their room. I think whatever that line is would make a great title for a play for any of adamant feminist writers out there who want to poke fun at this pathetic alteration of Ibsen’s play in Germany.) But, I digress.

I think one of Wright’s excellent insights is when he comments that,

“Human nature is to copy what we don’t know how to do, and so a student ends up putting together a Xerox of what the sample looks like. But were does the student go from there?”

Wright says this in the context of introducing his exercises and how he uses them. However, for those playwrights out there who have self-taught themselves from books (as I started) and found themselves mimicking the structures and designs of other playwrights, I think there will be general agreement that this leads directly to a very difficult period of adjustment when one must learn to think for oneself–as one eventually must if one is to truly be an artist. That is, there is a sense of dependency that is fostered and one must refer to other plays as guides or reference books–like learning php or css. “How did he do that again? Hmmm. Let me look.” Instead of just taking the proverbial bull by the horns and saying “damn it all, I’ll figure it out myself.” That step took me a while and I think that relying on a manner of creating plays that focuses on structure and building and proper arrangement of pieces for an effect leads to a manner of play creation that fosters this approach to writing. Wright goes on to say that “there is no longer any meaningful single definition of play that applies across the spectrum of what’s being created around the world, beyond saying that a play is a (largely) live event that takes place in a space that all involved have agreed is a “stage.” And that further,

“there is little reason to believe that theatre will retreat to the well-made play or to some rigid Aristotelian framework. Theatre is far more likely to continue its expansive form, subject matter, language, use of space, and so on. In fact, it will continue to embrace its eclectic heritage from the experiments of the twentieth century.”

By both accident and guidance from my professor/mentor Mike Geither I have found my way to this path, this “eclectic heritage.” And for that I am glad and hopeful for the more deeply meaningful and personal playwriting that it has engendered in me.