New Playwriting Strategies

A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting

Paul C. Castagno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135866532
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

New Playwriting Strategies

offers a fresh and dynamic approach to playwriting that will be welcomed by teachers and aspiring playwrights alike.

1
New Playwriting Strategies: Overview and Terms

New Playwriting Strategies explores playwriting from an innovative, forward-looking perspective. It presents a fundamentally different theoretical and practical approach to character, language, and dramatic form. The book challenges the underlying premises and assumptions that currently determine what constitutes a play. But the real goal is to provide you with the necessary tools to challenge your status quo as a playwright, so that you can write plays with an expanding range of new strategies and techniques.

As you are probably well aware, orthodoxy rules in the teaching and development of plays and playwrights. Many playwriting texts, including those written within the past ten years, rehash the core tenets of Aristotle's Poetics (ca. 325 B.C.) with long-standing “common-sense” dictums like conflict, the central protagonist, and character-specific dialogue. A purview of this literature leads to the undeniable conclusion that playwriting texts are resistant to change and innovation. There is no doubt that it is time to change the paradigm. In fact, the best playwrights in the past ten years already have.

In the face of “common-sense” traditional approaches to playwriting, we find increasing experimentation in the writing of plays not just at the margins, but in the mainstream. Many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays of the 1990s, including Margaret Edson's Wit, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, and Craig Lucas's Prelude to a Kiss used innovative forms and techniques to tell their stories. Now more than ever there is a widening gulf between the writing of contemporary plays and what is prescribed as correct playwriting. Certainly, the best playwriting students want to learn and incorporate the latest, most challenging techniques. Those collaborators involved with new play development, including producers, directors, literary managers, dramaturgs, and actors desire a point of entry into the new playwriting—the language of orthodoxy simply does not apply. It is time to talk about how plays are made and shaped in a different way.

New Playwriting Strategies stems from the basic premise that playwriting is language based. As such, language remains the dominant force in the shaping of characters, action, and theme. The playwright orchestrates the voices in the text, entering into a kind of dialogue with characters and language. The playwright is open to language in its widest sense, whether coded in a specific genre, found in another text, or produced by the linguistic impulses that unleash slang, unusual syntax, foreignisms, discourses, and so on. While “writing through” the other (often multiple) voices, the playwright remains the creative or orchestrating force behind the text. The term dialogism describes how the interactive relation between voices in the playtext shapes the play as an act of discovery.

A new approach to playwriting requires a distinctive set of terms and working tools, most of which are defined in this chapter. The following chapters establish a theoretical foundation that explores a new way of thinking about playwriting. Comparative charts demonstrate basic distinctions from traditional or orthodox approaches. Along the way, I provide numerous practical examples and exercises for the playwright. The point of view is from the perspective of the playwright—I am primarily interested in what useful strategy or technique can be gleaned from a given play. Therefore, the book does not probe thematic questions or underlying ideologies of the plays or playwrights. The result is a pragmatic study of new playwriting that challenges you to expand your imagination and technique.

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

While playwrights generally shy away from theory, it is necessary in this case to establish some fundamental principles about the new playwriting. In Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Culler describes theory as a “critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural” (1997, 15). New Playwriting Strategies questions many assumptions or “givens” about playwriting while offering alternative premises. Further, Culler states that theory is analytical and speculative. This book analyzes a number of plays by a group of playwrights, demonstrating how these works can spark the playwright's imagination and sense of invention. Herein we speculate on what a play might or can be. Finally, Culler tells us, theory is drawn from other disciplines, where removed from its original context it offers special insights and applications. Along these lines, I utilize the concept of dialogism as the inspiration and organizing principle for this book.

The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin first coined the term dialogism. He used it as a means to reevaluate certain nineteenth-century Russian novels that could not be categorized into traditional genres. These hybrid novels juxtaposed sophisticated literary techniques with storytelling elements drawn from folk culture, while other texts featured an array of linguistic styles, dialects, neologisms, and slang. Bakhtin used the term polyvocal to describe the divergent source materials that made up the text. (The term multivocality is used when multiple speech styles are bulked within a single character.)

Bakhtin assessed that the polyvocal text was an interactive system in which each element was in dialogue or dialogized with the other elements within the novel. Each part reacted with or against other parts in the text to create a dynamic sense of meaning and interest, which could not be distilled into a simple statement or unified arc. Plural, often contradictory, voices gave the dialogic text freer reign than traditional monologic formats. Rather than one narrator or point-of-view, multiple narrators vied with each other to tell the story. While the hybrid text resisted capture and classification, dialogism had offered a means of describing its inner workings and mechanisms.

By appropriating a definition of the dialogic novel, and substituting the word play for novel, we can establish a working definition of the dialogic play. The dialogic play is “fundamentally polyvocal (multi-voiced) or dialogic rather than monologic (single-voiced). The essence of the [play] is its staging of different voices or discourses and, thus, of the clash of social perspectives and points of view” (Culler, 1997, 89; bracketed text added). Formally, dialogism represents the play's capacity to interact within itself, as if the various components were in dialogue with each other.

LANGUAGE PLAYWRITING

To be credible, a new theory and method need models that “work,” or help to demonstrate certain points. To a great extent, the models used in the book are from the plays of an inspiring group of writers known as the “language playwrights” or “new playwrights.” The language playwrights have emerged over the past twenty years to stake out a significant territory in American theater. Since the 1970s they have been produced (and published) in and out of New York, and have been a major influence on the practice and pedagogy of playwriting. While their influence has been extraordinary within the field, they have been largely ignored for production in mainstream theater, and for the most part have escaped further critical inquiry.

Some of the award-winning leading figures are Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Constance Congdon, Eric Overmyer, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeffrey Jones, Paula Vogel, and Matthew Maguire. Other significant playwrights, like Richard Nelson, Tony Kushner, and Craig Lucas, explored this territory earlier in their careers but have since crossed over into other areas with greater commercial success. Furthermore, a number of these playwrights head (or teach in) top programs in playwriting at the university level: Jenkin at New York University; Wellman and Vogel at Brown University; Overmyer, Jones, and Parks at Yale University; and Maguire at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. This double-edged sword of teaching young writers and creative playwriting is already impacting future generations of playwrights.

THE DIALOGIC CLASH

While these playwrights each have a distinctive style, their methods of writing plays are fundamentally dialogic. Two examples of the dialogic approach demonstrate how this process works: Len Jenkin's Kitty Hawk represented a breakthrough in terms of defining what constitutes a play, and opened the door for a surge in new playwriting, while Eric Overmyer's On the Verge was the most widely produced of the new playwrights' works.

OBIE Award-winning playwright Len Jenkin first gained notice from Joseph Papp (of New York's Public Theater) and others through plays that were essentially dialogic in approach. One of his earliest works, Kitty Hawk, began simply by introducing the Wright brothers, inventors of the first airplane. As Jenkin proceeded to work on the play, he decided as an experiment to add various brother acts throughout American history, including such notables as the Smith brothers (cough drops) and James brothers (outlaws). The resultant play was unique in its formulation: dialogic in the juxtaposition and interaction between brother acts, each engaging different historical periods and levels of discourse in American culture.

Jenkin's background in comparative literature, in particular his interest in Russian literature, may explain his ease in handling multiple narrators and storytellers within the play. Jenkin's creative process is intuitive; he dialogizes the script by asking, What if this other brother act enters? What interactive dynamic can be energized? The relativity and number of acts is discovered in the making of the script; plot occurs as a kind of frisson or friction between character groups. There was no book that guided him to make plays this way; by ignoring the language of normative “how-to” playwrights, Jenkin developed his uniquely dialogic playwriting style. When I interviewed Jenkin several years ago, he stated that in revising his plays he still works dialogically: moving segments or blocks of text, attempting to discover an arrangement that works best for the play.

To date, the most widely ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 New Playwriting Strategies: Overview and Terms
• Part I Strategies of Language and Character
• Part II Strategies of Structure and Form
• Works Consulted
• Index