New Playwriting Strategies

Language and Media in the 21st Century

Paul Castagno, Paul C. Castagno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415491471
• eBook ISBN: 9781136630804
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Drama

New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms.

Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new techniques from a broad range of contemporary dramatists, including Sarah Ruhl, Suzan Lori-Parks and Young Jean Lee. New features in this edition include an in-depth study of the adaptation of classical texts in contemporary playwright and the utilizing new technologies, such as YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs to create alternative dramatic forms.

The author's step-by-step approach offers the reader new models for:

• narrative
• dialogue
• character
• monologue
• hybrid plays

This is a working text for playwrights, presenting a range of illuminating new exercises suitable for everyone from the workshop student to the established writer. New Playwriting Strategies is an essential resource for anyone studying and writing drama today.

1

New Playwriting Strategies: Overview and Terms

This second edition of New Playwriting Strategies (NPS) continues the exploration of 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 determine what constitutes a play. But the real goal is to provide you with the confidence and tools to challenge your status quo as a playwright, so that you can write plays with an expanding range of new strategies and techniques.

Until recently, orthodoxy ruled 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 bc) with long-standing “common-sense” dictums like conflict, the central protagonist, and character-specific dialogue. While the teaching of playwriting has advanced significantly over the past ten years, most playwriting texts remain resistant to change and innovation. The positive reception of the first edition, and its course adoption in many top programs, has helped to change this paradigm.

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. 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. This trend continued into the 2000s, with Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2002) and Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2009) winning the Pulitzer Prize, while other notably innovative plays, such as Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2005) and In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (2010), Will Eno’s Thom Paine (2005), and Rinde Eckert’s Orpheus X (2007) became finalists. Clearly, there is a widening gulf between the writing of contemporary plays and what has been prescribed as correct playwriting. Certainly, the best playwriting students want to learn and incorporate the latest, most challenging techniques. Concomitantly, the more seasoned collaborators involved with new play development, including producers, directors, literary managers, dramaturgs, and actors desire a point of entry into the new playwriting—where the language of orthodoxy does not apply. Now more than ever, as plays are made and shaped in different ways, it has become increasingly important to describe this phenomena with a pragmatic perspective toward how things work.

NPS established the basic premise that playwriting is language based. As such, language prevails as 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, historically based, 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. Dialogism, in its various manifestations, is the fundamental principle at work in new playwriting.

A new approach to playwriting requires a distinctive set of terms and working tools, most of which are defined in this chapter. The chapters that follow establish a theoretical foundation derived from select plays. We will explore together 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. These exercises have been tested over years of workshops and classes. The point of view is from the perspective of the playwright—to establish 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). NPS2 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 various 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.

Defining the Dialogic Play

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. As we will see in this edition, many of the dialogic principles that defined new playwriting ten years ago, can now be applied to the broader mainstream. Part of this may be due to the fact that dialogism anticipated the globalization of discourse and communication that defines our new millennium to date. Thus, the move to the dialogic play has been a natural extension of factors that have deeply influenced our evolving culture.

Language Playwriting

To be credible, a new theory and method need models that “work,” or help to demonstrate certain points. The models used in the book largely derive from the plays of writers known as the “language playwrights” or “new playwrights.” The language playwrights emerged over the past twenty to thirty 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. The latter is important because their persistent mentorship has greatly influenced new generations of playwrights. In this edition, we explore noteworthy second and third-generation new playwrights as well the ongoing work of their progenitors. While their influence has been extraordinary within the field, they have been largely ignored for production in the commercial theater, and until the first edition of NPS was published had generally escaped further critical inquiry.

Some of the award-winning leading figures from this first generation are Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Constance Congdon, Eric Overmyer, Erik Ehn, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeffrey Jones, Paula Vogel, and Matthew Maguire. Their workshops, classrooms, and influences have been felt by an entire generation of playwrights, many of whom will be considered going forward. As earlier stated, a number of these playwrights head (or teach in) top programs in playwriting at the university level. Wellman and Jones have aggressively championed the works of their students or mentees in the downtown New York theater scene. The newer generations of playwrights are aggressively pursuing production goals. Young Jean Lee, for example, has her own production company established to produce her newest works. This double-edged sword of teaching young writers and producing creative playwriting is already impacting future generations of playwrights.

The Dialogic Clash

While these playwrights of interest each have a distinctive style, their methods of writing plays are fundamentally dialogic. Two seminal 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 playwright’s works, and catapulted him into his successful television career.

OBIE Award-winning playwright Len Jenkin first gained notice from the late Joseph Papp (of New York’s Public Theater) and others through plays that were uniquely dialogic in approach. There really is nothing in the Off-Broadway historical avant-garde to compare it to. 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 doctoral background in comparative literature, in particular his interest in Russian nineteenth-century 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 di...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• New Playwriting Strategies: Overview and Terms
• Strategies of Language and Character
• On Multivocality and Speech Genres
• Polyvocality and the Ascendancy of the Hybrid Play
• The Theatricality of Character
• The Transformation of Character
• Len Jenkin's Dramaturgy of Character: From Stage Figures to Archetypes
• Mac Wellman: Language-Based Character
• Crossover Poetics: Sarah Ruhl and Suzan-Lori Parks
• Strategies of Structure and Form
• Units and Building Blocks
• Scenes, Acts, and Revisions
• Foundations of Contemporary Monologue
• Dialogic Monologue: From Structure to Antistructure
• Works consulted
• Index