As a teacher of playwriting at all levels (elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, trained and untrained) and who has been a reader for a wide variety of playwriting contests and grant applications, as well as having been a literary manager at a theatre accepting open submissions.... I have always wondered why so many playwrights write plays with impossible sight lines. Plays where characters sit at a bar and talk to a bartender, for example. Either the audience becomes the mirror and the bartender has his back to us, or we see the bartender and the backs of the two main characters. Unless it is angled, which means you get to see the bartender and one character in profile and the other is hidden from view. I know Saroyans Time of Your Life has the Arab at the bar for most of the play, but he only says No Foundation. All the way down the line... and half the time when he says it he gets up and says it to someone at a table before going back to his drink. There are lots of dinner scenes in plays, and yes, you can stage them like the Last Supper with everyone on one side of the table, but you sacrifice verisimilitude. I have read some very good plays that have prolonged arguments through a closed door, with no indication that one of the characters is technically off stage when the door is closed. I have even read plays that take place entirely in the confined space of an elevator (but were NOT intended to actually be performed in a real elevator, but on the main stage of a theatre). Ant Farm, but Ben R. Williams, is an excellent play set in a bomb shelter, that I directed a few years ago. There were whole scenes set in a locked room off of the main stage with simultaneous action and long scenes with four or five characters seated around a table playing Monopoly and then a burial in a back store room with a whole funeral scene. The only way to be true to the play and have the audience see the action was to to have see through stud walls and put the table thrust into the audience. Rewriting to suit sightlines would have killed the play, and though the scenes would have been perfectly suited to film or television, placing it in that medium would have destroyed the exciting quality of the audience feeling confined in the space along with the characters. I asked the playwright about these problems and he said that it had never occurred to him to think about it in production, he was just writing what he was seeing in his head. Ben was trained as a novelist, and this was his first play. Another time, I directed a reading and we ended up creating the catch phrase the miracle of the rock. It was a great story, and the playwright got really defensive when I told her it was still being imagined as a film, not yet a play. It took actually doing the reading to get her to see what I meant. There was a scene where a husband and wife are flirting on the couch, the exit in a black out, there is a sound of a window breaking and they come running back in wearing pajamas to see shattered glass on the floor and a rock with a note tied to it. There was no way to do the costume change and there was no way to actually get the broken glass on and then off again safely with actors in bare feet. And how does the rock appear? If thrown by an audience plant or dropped from the grid, the sound wont be at all like it going through a broken window. There was no trap door for a stage hand to open, place it, and disappear. There were other problems, including big scene changes: a different living room and kitchen with actual cabinets and brewing real coffee, looking at thematically important pictures in a scrapbook that the audience couldnt possibly see without an overhead shot. In fact, we did a publicity photo for the reading with that shot and the playwright admitted that was how she saw it in her head, she never pictured it from the point of view of an audience member. Anyway, now that all the really long explanation is done, here is the question. Do early career playwrights write these kinds of unstageable plays because they are more familiar with other mediums like novels, films and television? Or, are they really writing for those other mediums and the play is a transitional step to get them there? Given how angry playwrights get when I call their plays cinematic rather than theatrical, I am guessing the former and not the latter. As a forum of playwrights with a wide diversity of backgrounds and experience, what do you think is the best way to train the emerging playwright to think about their work being intentionally written for a stage with an audience that has very limited range of sight? Is it to read more plays, especially those written BEFORE film and television? Is it to see lots of plays in lots of different kinds of theatres? Is it to spend time in an actual theatre experiencing directly the roles of other collaborators by watching a director in rehearsal for someone elses play? Acting in a play themselves? Working behind the scenes as a stage hand on a few plays? Taking a design class or workshop with a scenic and lighting designer? Produce and direct their own work so they confront the other problems head on themselves? All of the above? Something else I havent mentioned? Or is none of that important and playwrights should keep their vision and impulse pure, leaving it up to the director and designers to adapt the script to the stage? Sometimes the comment that a play is unstageable or should be a film, does indicate a lack of imagination on the part of the people evaluating the text, but I also wonder if there isnt room for playwrights to gain a greater familiarity with the practical aspects of the medium they are writing for without reining too much of their creative impulse in.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 11:56:17 +0000
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