Category: Drama/Playwriting

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 14 – Topdog/Underdog

Sorry for the late post playwrights! I was on the road yesterday and returned home to find my Internet was down.

It’s time to talk about the second play on our reading list for the month, Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for this play in 2002. The committee described the play as follows:

“A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, Topdog/Underdog tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names, given to them as a joke, foretell a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by their past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.”

The play takes place in Booth’s cramped apartment, where Lincoln has come to live because his wife kicked him out for cheating. Lincoln, an ex-card sharp who “swore off thuh cards,” dons white face makeup to take a job as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade, where tourists pay money to shoot him. Booth, determined to learn his brother’s former trade, doesn’t seem to have what it takes to be a hustler and instead resorts to shoplifting to survive. The two reminisce about their childhood and share their memories of when, as teenagers, their parents left them to find their own way in the world. One minute they give each other heartfelt career advice, the next they insult each other as only brothers can. The tensions between them build to a tragic climax.

The play is about what it means to be family and what it means to be a black man in America. It is about struggling through life, but with someone else, not alone. Parks has also said it is about “who the world thinks you’re going to be, and how you struggle with that.”

One Thing (Okay, Two Things) I Noticed: Parks uses the simple stage direction “(rest),” to indicate a pause in a character’s speech, but she also quite often will just list the character’s names, one after the other, as if they are going to give a line of dialogue but then don’t. It’s almost as if the characters are tossing the awkward silence back and forth between them like a ball. She also sometimes has the characters deliver a shared line together. As she explains in this great interview in The Interval–which is chock full of insights on the craft of playwriting and the author’s creative process—she sometimes makes the decision to do this when she is revising a play for a new production.

One Idea: Write a play in which two or more characters come and go from a central “home base”: roommates coming and going from their apartment, co-workers with back-to-back shifts, a courier making daily deliveries. Have the story unfold as the characters relate to each other what has taken place in the outside world since their last meeting. Let what they choose to reveal and how they reveal it expose the nature of their relationship.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 13 – Unresolved Conflict

Okay playwrights, today we’re going to address an elephant in the room: unresolved conflict. Say that your characters have a conflict that started at some time in the past and something happened that prevented them from resolving it. Maybe one character moved away, maybe they just stopped speaking to each other, or maybe a detent was reached for the sake of some other person. Whatever it is, now your characters are thrown back together in a way that triggers that old conflict.

Day 13 – Unresolved Conflict: Take two to four characters from your stock company and write a 10-minute scene in which an old conflict is unearthed and rehashed in the present. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

There are two ways in which the passage of time should have an effect here: (1) by intensifying emotions and (2) by allowing each character to develop a distorted, subjective memory of the triggering event. Ask yourself these questions:

  • How much time has elapsed?
  • What brought the characters back together?
  • Was their reintroduction voluntary or forced?
  • Do things start out polite or are they tense from the get go?
  • Does the conflict get resolved or worsen?

Remember, you don’t have to fully explain the original triggering event to your reader or audience. Keeping them guessing about what really happened is part of the fun.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 12 – Balancing the Comic and Serious

Hi playwrights! Ready for a real challenge? Today we’re going to write a comedic scene with serious undertones.

Day 12 – Play with Surface Comedy: Using two characters from your stock company (other than those used in the confrontation scene, write a 10-minute scene that is outwardly comic, although the situation is serious for one or both of the characters. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

This is a powerful dynamic that can serve several different purposes, adding poignancy or providing comic relief to a tense situation. Maybe your characters are fighting about something really dumb, but it becomes apparent that the argument is morphing into “the argument” that recurs between them. Maybe something ridiculous happens and, in trying to fix it, the characters make it much, much worse. Maybe the characters have a sudden fit of giggles during a serious moment–during a funeral, a wedding toast, or a church service.

So what’s funny? Did you know there are at least 20 different types of comedy? Challenge yourself even further by picking one randomly and trying to incorporate it into your scene.

Happy writing!

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 11 – Letting Your Setting Reflect Your Conflict

Hi playwrights! Today challenge is all about using your scene’s setting to reflect or be a metaphor for the conflict between your characters.

Day 11 – Let the Setting Drive the Scene: Using four characters from your stock company, write a 10-minute scene that uses setting as a subtle reflection of the conflict.  Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

So what does this mean? The author’s of The Playwright’s Handbook give the following examples:

  • A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen: Nora has two choices. She can stay in her comfortable home, where her husband treats her like a child and a possession, or she can leave, an option symbolized by a prominent window showing the outside world.
  • Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill: the sun gives way to fog to show increased isolation
  • Painting Churches, by Tina Howe: the slow moving of furniture from a house marks the end of a family’s life together
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams: fireworks and thunder herald confrontation

So play with your scene descriptions and stage directions and try to subtly (whatever you do, don’t have one of your characters notice it) play up the confrontation.

Happy writing!

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 10 – Confrontation Scene

Okay playwrights, are you ready to write a full-on confrontation scene? No little squabble here. We’re going to let our characters get physical, let them say things they will certainly regret later, let them go all at it.

Day 10 – Write a Confrontation Scene: Using any two characters from your stock company, write a 10-minute all-out, no-holds-barred confrontation scene. Extra Credit: Re-write the scene for three characters. Make the third character an unwilling spectator/participant. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Confrontations are entertaining for readers and audiences. They’re the heart of drama. But they can be intimidating to write. What if it sounds fake or overdone? To keep it believable, think of major confrontations in your own life. Try to include some of the same sensory details you can remember. Don’t be timid. Start with high tension and go even higher! And make full use of your setting. Is there a door that can be slammed? A glass to throw? A balcony someone can get thrown off of?

If you choose to write the scene with a third character, make him or her an unwilling participant who gets dragged into the fight. Do the other two characters try to use the third as a witness or an ally?

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 9 – Group Scene

Okay playwrights, you have a handful of quirky and complex characters to work with. Shall we throw them all together and see what happens?

Day 9 – Write a Group Scene: Write a 10-minute scene using all six characters from your stock company. Use an appropriate central reflector [one pivotal idea, person, object, place, or event on which all the characters have an opinion] to anchor and focus the scene, reveal character and relationships, and generate conflict. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

In a scene with a lot of characters, it’s easy to lose focus. A central reflector is something that connects the characters to each other. It’s the thing they all have in common. Maybe one of your characters has a problem and everyone around him chimes in with some advice. Or maybe something provokes your characters into voicing their opinions on a politically charged issue. Maybe your central reflector is an object. Your characters found something rare. Is it real or fake? Maybe something important was lost and the characters are all trying to find it. Maybe all of your characters witness a startling event, like a car crash or a crime, or even something more mundane, like a toddler throwing a tantrum in a public place. How do they react? What do they say when its over?

If you would like to take another look at the formatting practices for scene writing, click here. I’m also going to put them under the “Resources” tab.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 8 – Create a Stock Company [updated]

Hi playwrights! This week, as we make our way through the intermediate workshop exercises in The Playwright’s Handbook, we’re going to be writing a few more scenes. First things first. We’ll need to have some characters on hand to cast in our scenes.

Day 8 – Create a Stock Company: Create six characters to use in the Intermediate exercises. Three of the characters should be based on people you observe in the present, and three of the characters should be based on people you knew in the past. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

At this point, your character descriptions don’t have to be very long. Give us your character’s name, age, the very basics of what he or she looks like, and a line or two about his or her personality, history, or relationship to one or more of the other characters. Finally, think of one way this character will stick out. Is it the way she’s dressed? Is it something odd that he keeps doing? Does this character demand to be the center of attention? Does she have an unusual speech pattern or nervous habit? Try to think of something that will provoke a reaction from some of your other characters.

And don’t try too hard to figure out how the characters know each other or what their roles will be in the scenes you will write. Maybe a couple of them know each other already, but it’s also just fine if they a bunch of random people whose paths are about to collide.

[updated]

ALICEA
Maria Luisa Alicea Garcia de la Renta (“please, baby, you gotta just call me Alicea”), 50, is the owner of De La Renta’s, a strip mall hair salon in a middle-class Midwestern town. A former prosecutor and the state’s first Latina lieutenant governor, seven years ago Alicea suffered a closed-head injury while snowmobiling with her boyfriend and spent six months in a medically induced coma. In moments of great lucidity, when no one would suspect that she has cognitive problems, Alicea has built a small but thriving business to supplement her disability payments. In bad moments, her staff covers for her or, in some cases, takes advantage of her short-term memory loss. Alicea’s boyfriend Patrick, consumed by guilt over his role in the accident, now dotes on her. 

JACK
Jack Kling, 36, is a beauty-school dropout who traded sexual favors with a closeted county official to obtain his license to work as a hair stylist. He specializes in “set and sprays” for blue-haired old ladies, who find him irresistibly charming. He flirts with them shamelessly, as only an obviously gay man can. Jack is partial to cutoff denim shorts, Havainas, and designer white tank tops, which he wears with Hermes neckerchiefs the old ladies bring him back from London, Paris, and Naples (Florida). Jack recently moved into an impeccably preserved Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home that his celebrity architect boyfriend purchased for them, on the occasion of their one-year anniversary. Architecture students touring the home from the nearby university are often thrilled to find Jack, dressed in boxer briefs and a lavender chenille robe, chain smoking and sipping espresso from a chaise lounge in the home’s interior courtyard.

PHIL
Philip K. Roundtree, 59, is the founding partner of Roundtree & Associates, a boutique law firm representing start-up companies in patent and trademark litigation. Tall and doughy, partial to brown suits and wide-striped ties, and vain with his hair, Roundtree receives a weekly “man”icure that is little more than a blunt cut and buff, but makes him feel quite European. Having just sent his only child Madeline off to college in the South, Roundtree is rather flagrantly carrying on an extramarital affair with a 25-year-old woman he met at Starbucks.

MS. SWITCH
Linda Swiechzkowski (“Ms. Switch” to her students), 53, is an unmarried high school English teacher who tends toward the morbid, opening her class with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and rounding out the semester with lots of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Tall and awkwardly thin, she wears high-waisted pleated slacks and sweater sets in cheerful pastel colors, with low chunky heels. Her hair is short and spikey, and her bony wrists and ankles protrude from her clothing as if she inherited the wardrobe of some slightly plumper, slightly shorter English teacher who came before her.

ARIEL
Ariel Jones, 17, is the only bi-racial student at the large high school in her still-yes-still-segregated Midwestern town. Arial can and does pass for any ethnicity she chooses to claim, an attribute she hopes to put to good use one day as a Saturday Night Live cast member, just like her hero, Maya Rudolf. Off to college in the fall, she’s making money this summer as a “bookings specialist” at De La Renta’s. Ambivalent about her appearance, Ariel lets the stylists experiment on her in their off hours. Her glossy brown hair currently looks like it was dipped in ice-blue Kool-Aid and her long, no-chip nails are jet black with silver tips. She wears purple lipstick in a pout like a geisha. Most days, Ariel is taken for some young Puerto Rican relation of Alicea’s, a supposition she rarely bothers to correct.

LOTTIE
Charlotte (“Lottie”) Benson, 67, has a precision-cut bob with straight-edge bangs that just brush her eyebrows. The look requires frequent touch-ups and Lottie often brings her five-year-old granddaughter, Ada-Sophia, who she is responsible for two days a week, to the salon with her. Fancying herself a writer, Lottie carries an old spiral-bound notebook with her everywhere she goes, jotting down snatches of other people’s conversations. She has a habit of speaking to Ada-Sophia as if she were a small baby or deaf (or both), constantly describing what is happening around them in a sing-song voice, as if the child possesses no powers of observation of her own.

ADA-SOPHIA
Ada-Sophia Benson (ADD-a, not AY-da), 5 ¾, is smarter and more observant than anyone gives her credit for. Often tormented by her older sister when adults are not around, she has cultivated a quiet strength that will serve her well in life. Ada-Sophia appears to ignore her grandmother completely but will one day write a bestselling memoir in which Lottie figures quite prominently (and unflatteringly).

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 7 – Death of a Salesman

Hi writers, we’ve reached the end of Week 1 of our playwriting workshop! As we worked on writing the component parts of a play, I hope you also enjoyed reading the first of four plays we’ll discuss this month, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. This is of course the classic, award-winning play about Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman. In a series of flashbacks, Willy looks back on his life, in which he has always just managed to scrape by but has never achieved the sort of success he imagined he would, and tries to determine where and why everything went wrong. The play is in two acts (plus a requiem) and has only a handful of main characters. It is about success, failure, and the American dream. It is also about the relationship between fathers and sons, the way fathers graft their unrealized dreams onto their sons, and what happens when sons become disillusioned when they discover their fathers’ faults.

Many, many people have analyzed this play over the years. If the version you read has a good introduction, then you already have some understanding of its themes and innovations. As I did with the short stories we read last month, I’m going to make only a couple of points: one thing I noticed and one idea the play gave me for my own future writing.

One Thing I Noticed: Miller really plays with time here. It’s what the play is famous for. Time collapses as Willy’s worries coalesce. This is primarily achieved through set design and stage direction. When the scene is in the present, the characters respect the wall lines of the house. When it is in the past, they are free to step through the walls to the forestage, which also doubles as the house’s back yard. With this simple trick the past and the present seem to coexist, as if everything has already played out and we are right there with Willy, sifting through the layers of sediment to figure out what happened to his life.

I recently saw a production of Macbeth in which the normal subdued lighting was switched (I think a little chime also sounded) to a glaring overhead light each time the audience was meant to understand that the words Macbeth spoke were not heard by the other characters onstage but were his own internal thoughts. This was pretty effective. Under that glaring light the audience saw Macbeth for who he really was, a man driven by ruthless ambition.

One Idea: Play with the idea of causation. Write a scene in two ways (three? four?), exploring two very different outcomes. See if, through set design, lighting, costumes, or how the characters interact with each other or move on the stage, you can present both versions simultaneously. Maybe the same exact thing is happening in the different versions until one moment, when something happens that makes the stories split off from each other and triggers the different outcomes. Are the versions alternate realities? Do they exist only in the mind of one of your characters, who is wondering “what if?” Do the versions stray from each other but then come back, so that the outcomes are essentially the same? Does this say something about fate or inevitability in your character lives?

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 6 – Put the Pieces Together

Okay playwrights, we’re finally ready to put together a full scene. Now, there is a proper way to do this, aesthetically speaking–a lot of rules about fonts, line spacing, and margin width to adhere to. If you ever want to submit your play for publication or to a theater company for possible production, you’ll want to pay close attention to all of this. And even now, writing the first draft of your first ever scene, it doesn’t hurt to visualize your end product. Here is a guide I found that not only walks you through all of the specifics, but provides a few sample pages to help you visualize how everything will look on the page.

Day 6 – Write the Scene: Based on everything you’ve done so far, write the first draft of a brief scene (5 typed pages) with a strong, clear-cut conflict between the two characters. [Extra Credit: Write the scene again, using the same characters and conflict, but have the scene unfold in the past setting instead of the present setting.] Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Remember, this is a first draft. You’ll probably want to trim it down later, so don’t be afraid to over write a bit now. And keep in mind this is just one scene. You don’t have to resolve the conflict yet. As the authors of The Playwright’s Handbook say, “[w]ork instead toward creating a well-balanced, interesting struggle.”

And have fun!

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 5 – Plan Your Scene

He playwrights! As we approach the end of our first week we are going to move into scene-writing. So what exactly is a scene? It’s basically a mini-play. It has all of the components–setting and character description, stage direction, and dialogue–but there are no location changes or jumps in time; in a scene, setting is fixed and time is continuous. Dialogue is generally the heart of a scene, but we can’t just jump into it unprepared. Ten pages later we may have no idea where the scene is going, though our characters are still chatting away. No, we need a plan.

Day 5 – Describe a Scenario: As the foundation for a short scene, put together a basic scenario—a narrative description of everything that happens in the scene from lights up to lights down. Focus the scene on a conflict that arises between the two characters you’ve created. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Every scene should be driven by a conflict, no matter how great or small. Sketching out the scene allows you to figure that all out. What do your characters want? Why do they want it? What stands in their way? What are they going to do about it?

Remember, this is where we put together everything we’ve learned so far. Take this advice from the authors of The Playwright’s Handbook:

“When working through the scenario for this scene, use all the resources you have at your disposal. Go back to the groundwork you laid in the previous steps of the workshop to find tactics and obstacles. For example, setting: Is there a door to slam? A Tequila Sunrise to throw in his face? Or language: Would he shout to get his way? Or be silent? Or whine? Or swear? Or physical activities: Would he rip up the only copy of her manuscript? Would she just go on playing the guitar and ignore him? Or the personality profile/life history of the character: Would he lie through his teeth? Would she bring up something he’d done in the past?”

Have fun writers! Tomorrow we work on completing the scene with some dialogue.