Teaching First-Time Playwrights

Yeah. That's Euripides. Another odd bird of three.

Yesterday I taught one of my favorite sessions of my Introduction to Creative Writing class here at BU.  We've spent much of the semester learning about and workshopping poetry and fiction, and now, in the last couple weeks, we move to Playwriting. 
But, unlike the transition from poetry to fiction, the students are figuring out how to use another medium - what ends up on the page is as important as ever, but incidental to the thing we ultimately refer to as "theatre."  It is a sister art of the two, and shares a lot -- economy, the power of the voice, image and music with poetry; it shares character, some structural components (conflict, plotting, climax), and Gardner's "vivid and continuous dream" with fiction. (That's from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, a lovely cranky book young fiction writers should own!) But it remains the odd bird of the three. 

But the kind of writing a play requires is often so different from the other two, it can feel to the first-timer, comfortable working on the page, as if I'd asked them to show up for their painting class only to find ballet shoes instead of easels. 

Writing for movement; writing for any kind of performance is a sinewy request and begs the writer to imagine the world around the challenges the words present - every step of the way (pun intended).  How do we understand the dynamic between two characters without bumbling into dull expository dialogue?  How do we keep from over-writing when the language of the actors' bodies, or the movement of a prop, or even a lighting change tells us paragraphs of information?  And most importantly, how do you trick yourself into writing action by action the content and heart of an idea? 

You can't.  You CAN'T -  if you do it by yourself.  You need to put your script down and watch actors move and speak your lines.   You need to see the letter hidden in the plant to know if it makes sense there.    You need to see actors improvise the moments you can't get right.  You need to realize that the quick change doesn't work there, that the black out stops the action too much, that your character needs to change clothes before the next scene or it doesn't makes sense.  You need a director or a designer to help you step back from the play to see the bigger shape it makes. 

What makes it my favorite class of the year?  I hand silly props (a plastic duck, an odd bird) to writers who have worked hard in their dorm rooms all semester, pair them up, and ask them to write something in ten minutes. 

A: "Hold this."

B: "What is it?"

A: "Watch!"

B: "Will it hurt?"
 

A: "You'll see."  

The ballet shoes suddenly make sense. 

3 Questions with Kate (on the MFA at BPT)

Less public than our productions but no less harrowing to our playwrights are our weekly workshops -- our classes taught (often on the set of our current shows) by playwrights Kate Snodgrass, Richard Schotter, Melinda Lopez and Ronan Noone.  And if you didn't know it:  Boston Playwrights' Theatre is Boston University's Playwriting MFA program.  I asked Kate Snodgrass a couple questions about her experience as a teacher of playwriting.   

Jake:  Can you give an example of something you experienced as a student in workshop that you try to avoid in your classrooms now?  Are you successful?

Kate: In a fiction workshop I was attending, the teacher laughed at one of the student's stories.  I don't laugh at any serious stab at playwriting--it's hard enough to write as it is.  And yes, I'm successful because I remember that student's face.

J: What play or playwright do you most often recommend new playwrights read?  Why?  

K: We're all different writers who gravitate to different rhythms, tones, worlds, and there's room for everyone in the theatre.  I wait until I understand what might encourage a particular student, and then I suggest a specific play or playwright s/he might gravitate toward.  There are playwrights with whom I think we ALL must be familiar, but...that's a different question.  (Okay.  Shakespeare, Buchner, Chekhov, O'Neill, Wilder, Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, Stoppard, LePage.  And some others.)

J: What is the most difficult lesson to teach a playwright?  

K: A point of view encompassing the three-dimensional space.