I could state this point in many ways and many, many times and it will still fall on deaf ears. Writers can be absent minded about their work but see a flaw clearly in another’s work. I know this to be fact because I’ve had to go through this point of “writing maturity” for myself but have also seen it in every playwright I’ve known and at every level of writing.
I recently saw "Evelyn in Purgatory" by Topher Payne, a very talented playwright and someone that has achieved a lot of success in Atlanta. The play was basically people stuck in a room talking. To Director Carolyn Choe’s credit, she found ways to make most of it work. But there were simply way too many literary references littering the play, and then Act Two opened with the characters reading a screenplay in the play. We had to listen to characters read a screenplay in a play!!!!! It was a poor choice by a talented writer.
The lesson is that writers must challenge themselves to get beyond their own habits and work to craft a play. It doesn't matter if you love something or if it strokes your ego, it is not a piece of art until the writer has made hard choices. Just like actors making choices about a character, writers must constantly be pushing themselves to make strong choices.
So what is a strong choice? Well, having characters read a screenplay in the play is not, and reading poems, quoting Shakespeare or spending time analyzing literature also qualify as weak choices where the writer is settling for the easy route. But a strong choice is to have a character ACTIVELY trying to achieve their goal by trying to gain something from another character(s). And the writer must find a way to demonstrate this agenda by what the character does, not by what they say. As my friend Daphne Mintz likes to say, “Action is character.” The simple act of a man or woman putting on his/her clothes can tell me far more about that character than any words on the page. Obviously physical confrontations on the stage are strong forms of actions but so are smaller acts like deception (stealing, hiding items). How one character may touch another character is a great indicator of how they use their personal power and how a character relates to the set pieces or props (yes, the writer should be thinking of these things). On stage everything should have a relationship to the people and the chosen set pieces and props on the stage. And they all provide opportunities for action. A simple stage direction of “CHARLIE bangs his head against the dented front door” tells me he has done this before. Or “LAURIE folds all the chairs in the room and carefully organizes them during this stretch of dialogue.” In this case the writer is providing an opportunity to argue about chair stacking as a means to get to the underlying emotional issue.
As a writer, being direct and writing on point is something that should be used sparingly. As an audience member, I say, “lie to me” and show me “how you feel” by “what you do” and by “what you avoid saying.” If you can do this, then you are beginning to craft a play and not settle for just being a writer.
And if you don’t believe what I am trying to communicate in this post I will reference an article in Entertainment Weekly from August 30, 2013. A friend recommended the article and it makes some great points. It is a quick interview with the writers of “Game of Thrones.” The article is by Darren Franich. It quotes writer David Benioff, “If you have a scene where somebody is telling you a 10 minute story about something that happened to them back in the day . . . I’m not saying it can’t work, but it better be a damn good story because otherwise it’s a guy flapping his lips for 10 minutes on screen.” Currently there is way too much gum flapping in the world of new plays. We have some very talented writers in Atlanta, but the time is now for them to challenge themselves and to not settle for words on a page that make them feel good but to craft a play that integrates words, action, character, and set into a whole picture that becomes a work of art. It is a rare thing. But it is a very worthwhile goal.
