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In May 2004 I will graduate from my MFA program in Dramatic Writing at New York University. Overall, I have benefited a lot from the program. The confrontation with a nakedly commercial approach to dramatic writing has been both bracing and abrasive, and while I don't think I advanced much as a writer in terms of creative output, I did move forward in being able to clarify much more exactly the structures and strategies I use in my writing. If nothing else, I can parse the tri-level motivations of characters in Ibsen and apply it to my own concept of what drives my own characters.
Armed with all of this "knowledge," over the last six months I plunged into reading scripts for three different theatre festivals and competitions in New York as a way of "paying back" three theatres who have been good to me and my work. Here is the state of script writing, at least in the small slice that came down the sluices, and it falls, Aristotle-like, into three parts.
The first observation is an odd one, given that we were reading scripts written for the theatre. Whether using long, medium, or short forms, many, many writers have no real feel for dramatic action, and I mean that in two ways. First, they lack a sense of the action on stage being "driven," that is, every element, right down to the individual word, being designed to effect some sort of change. Things on stage are supposed to move, and so many scripts simply stayed inert. Second, their understandings of what drives change in characters are often limited to just "conflict," which generates heat but no light. They don't understand that conflict is simply one of the devices available to a writer to play out what a good play is really about: the struggle by someone to understand what cannot be understood about life, to solve the unsolvable mysteries, to say the unsayable.
This dominance of "conflict" is not surprising. It is the reigning mantra in all playwriting instruction, and its place at the top of the list is not surprising. After all, we live in a culture which fetishizes competition, with its collateral winners and losers, and believes that winning is a sign of virtue. But the end-product of winning, after all, is simply desire re-ignited, which generates the next round of competition to satisfy the desire, etc. This is what passes for primary motivations in common playwriting classes.
Which is also why a lot of the plays, despite sound and fury, simply go nowhere -- it's just round after round of aching and whining and getting and losing. And this brings me to my second observation: the thinness of the ideas underneath the play.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that many of the plays don't have an idea at all, in the sense of some kind of thought-through wrestling with the world and the way it works. I find attitudinizing, posturing, cliché-recycling, regurgitation. And the scripts where you feel like there's a mind underneath using the stage to work through something -- exploring some kind of "what if?" -- the thinking feels self-limited, confined to our standard-issue mythologies about politics, psychology (especially in the wrong-headed belief that there is something called a "human nature"), sociology, and so on. There was very little sense of intellectual adventure in the writing, of passion and engagement and ebullience. Just a lot of noodling.
And this probably contributes to my third observation: the banality of the writing. Now, "banality" can be an artistic decision -- look at Ionesco's use of the commonplace to highlight the absurd. But in many of the scripts, the banality was a natural issue from the banality of the subject matter or structural approach. I'm not just talking about an absence of "poetry" but also a feeling that the writer is engaged in a wrassle with the language to squeeze it and shape it and make it yield new distillations. A possibly horrible piece of advice to playwrights, right up there with "make it about conflict," is "write as you speak." Theatre is a special place demanding a special language -- we don't need transcripts of the street but translations.
Now, I know that these scripts represent only a small slice of all scripts spilling out from printers around the country and the world (at times it seems as if anyone who centers a character name and writes a line of patter considers himself or herself a playwright). But of the three hundred or so people I read, I would say most need to start at the very beginning of the beginning and learn their craft, learn their discipline, re-think and re-tool everything. It is a mantra that theatres want new scripts from new writers, etc., etc. But these theatres, I believe, need to be much more demanding and critical about the "newness" they call for so that the untutored stuff like the stuff I read can wither away. "Theatre" is always in some kind of decline, and it's tempting, in a Jeremiah kind of way, to predict that unless theatres get real "new" stuff, they, too will wither away. But it is true that unless theatres demand works that excite, provoke, soothe, and send people into the night feeling as if they have just experienced a new world of possibilities and pains, then the institution of theatre will just noodle along. And, to me at least, theatre and life are too short and important and damned interesting for just noodling -- they demand bigger writers and bull-in-the-china-shop writing. (Now, "Bull In The China Shop" might be an interesting festival title -- hmm…)
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