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What have I been doing? (besides sleeping, it seems)
I haven’t posted in a few days and it may be a few more before I start talking about anything meaningful.

I’m in that happy down state after a play has been pushed from conception/inception to, well, in this case, about as far as it will go for now without a full run. I’ve got some real ‘pull-up-your-sleeves’ rewriting to do, but I’m going to let it sit for a while. I did tape the reading, so I can watch it at a later date and see all the painful points again.

For my NEOMFA class I have to write a paper on my “art” and why it’s important or what is relevant about it. That is something I haven’t really thought about, so I find the question quite intriguing and if there’s anyone else out there reading this blog and who is a playwright I would put the question to you as well. Why is the theatre important? What does it do for people? What does it do for you?

Shadows of the Gods

Now, I’m re-reading an article by Arthur Miller entitled The Shadows of the Gods: A Critical View of the American Theater; Harper’s Magazine, 1958 Aug; 217: 35-43. It is a speech he delivered, to whom I don’t know, but has some very interesting points in it.

I’m not going to address the question now, as I’m writing a paper that will. When I’m done, I’ll choke up the blogosphere with the results. In the mean time, I’ll mention a few points that Miller discusses that I find interesting, and then link to a blog entry by someone who has a completely different take on Miller. But, as I’m using this article in my paper and I’m only half way through a serious re-read, I’ll not be considering it too much either.

1. Miller mentions, in passing, that ‘professionalism develops only as a result of having repeated the same theme in different plays’; p35
2. He was ‘shaped’ as a person by the Great Depression and says that the time period gave him “a sense of an invisible world” and that “The hidden laws of fate lurked not only in the characters of people, but equally if not more imperiously in the world beyond the family parlor…” and this led him to a profound interest in process–“How things connected” p36
3. For him playwriting and art became a way of addressing or answering “the practical problem of what to believe in order to proceed with life.” p36
4. “‘The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.’ The hidden will be unveiled; the inner laws of reality will announce themselves.” p37
5. “There is a hidden order in the world. There is only one reason to live. It is to discover its nature. The good are those who do this. The evil say that there is nothing beyond the face of the world, the surface reality. Man will only find peace when he learns to live humanly in conformity to those laws which decree his human nature.” (This is what Miller says that Dostoevski’s The Brother’s Karamazov said to him). p37
6. “I connected with Ibsen…because he was illuminating process. Nothing in his plays exists for itself, not a smart line, not a gesture that can be isolated.” p37
7. Finally, one that answers the question I asked above, to some degree: “One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives. With the greatest of presumption I conceived that the great writer was the destroyer of chaos, a man privy to the councils of the hidden gods…”

But this is enough for now. The article goes on another six pages and for those interested I highly recommend getting it. If you can’t find it, email me and I’ll run it through the handy-dandy Side Kick scanner I have access to and shoot you a copy of it–marked up as it is. If you’re really nice to me, I’ll make you a fresh copy.

Screenplay time…

I’ve also started reading STORY (imperious) by Robert McKee again. I am going to (finally) go head on at a screen play idea that I have. I’ll talk about it later as I get beyond the “step outline” process I’m doing now. For a screenplay I find that I’m totally throwing aside the process that I advocated for playwriting earlier. For some reason I think that, for my first screenplay at least, structure and control are important. I’ve already got 22 index cards with an ordered listing of scenes. I just need to flesh it out and add more scenes and really get the whole step outline finished an in place. In the mean time, the messy side of me is generating piles of content about the characters, the world (it is futuristic a la Ray Kurzweil), and the events that control their destinies.

I’m having fun with this and so look forward to the process. I know soon enough, like a play I’m writing, this thing will take over my waking mind completely and the fun will morph into a mania that will only expire when I’ve done with the thing–seen it through to its completion and several re-writes and, hopefully, the silver screen.

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 [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically[/amazon_link], 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 [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]his book[/amazon_link], 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 [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Wright[/amazon_link] 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?