USEFUL COMMENTS CONCERNING THE

ELEMENTS OF A PLAY

Character

Characters-central and secondary alike-must be allowed me write themselves. You as the writer set their boundaries whether by conscious decision or through the discovery process of writing from the impulse. In either case, you create a general set of rules for them within the play. For example, you may determine their age, their sex, their general traits possibly even their emotions and actions. You know basically how they will respond to the various situations into which you may put them. But after that, you set them free to behave as they will. If you control too much, they may very quickly become passive.

The Playwright's Guidebook by Stuart Spencer

Dialogue

Stage dialogue has three functions:
1. Creates atmosphere: the environment in which the action takes place.
2. Reveals character: by what each one says, and the way he or she says it.
(Be careful with dialects and slang.)
3. Advances the plot: keep moving ahead with a coherent story line.
Remember these points:
=Dramatic dialogue: speech, concentrated and directed.
=Dialogue must be enlivened with internal conflict.
= One speech, one idea.
= Beware of old-fashioned style in dialogue.
= For important information, use the three-times rule.
= Avoid author-intrusion in style or in matters of fact.
= A name at the beginning strengthens a line; a name at the end weakens it.
= For a strong line, place the important words at the end.
= As often as possible, create suspense within the line.
= For best comic effect, place the punch at the end of the line.
= Repetition of key words, from line to line, heightens comic effect.
= Write dialogue that will aid and please your actors: dialogue should becomprehensible; dialogue should be easy to memorize.
= Dialogue should be coherent, one line leading naturally to the next, but avoid duplicate cues.
= Dialogue should be easy to speak.
= Write every word that you want to have spoken.
= Share the dialogue among all the characters on stage.
= Write good exit lines.
= Trim dialogue to be concise.
How to Write a Play by Raymond Hull

Structure

Put in its simplest and most mundane terms, the basic task of anyone concerned with presenting any kind of drama to any audience consists in capturing their attention and holding it as long as required. Only when that fundamental objective has been achieved can the more lofty and ambitious intentions be fulfilled: the imparting of wisdom and insight, poetry and beauty, amusement and relaxation, illumination and purging of emotion. If you lose their attention, if you fail to make them concentrate on what is happening, on what is being said, all is lost.
The creation of interest and suspense (in their very widest sense) thus underlies all dramatic construction. Expectations must be aroused, but never, until the last curtain, wholly fulfilled; the action must seem to be getting nearer to the objective yet never reach it entirely before the end; and, above all, there must be constant variation of pace and rhythm, monotony of any kind being certain to lull the attention and induce boredom and somnolence.

An Anatomy of Drama by Martin Esslin.

MORE ON STRUCTURE

Plays might have one, two, three, four, even five "official" acts, but every good play embodies three distinct movements, adhering to the following very rough outline:
Part One (15-30 percent of the play)
Start of play.
Introduction of characters, place, time, setting or exposition.
Introduction of the primary inciting event.
Initial point of attack or primary conflict.
Introduction of the central dramatic question.
Part Two (50-75 percent of the play)
Character(s) embark on journey/struggle/search for answers/goals.
Conflicts with other characters, events, circumstances.
Character(s) reassess situations, respond to obstacles and challenges, plan new tactics, succeed, fail, attack, retreat, surprise and are surprised, encounter major reversals (rising action).
A crisis is reached.
Characters embark on an action that will resolve the crisis and lead inexorably to the conclusion.
Part Three (5-25 percent of the play)
The major characters or combatants engage in a final conflict (climax).
The character(s)' goal is achieved or lost.
The central dramatic question is answered.
The actions suggest the themes or ideas of the play.
Following the climax is the resolution, in which a new order is established.
End of Play

The Art & Craft of Playwriting by Jeffery Hatcher

Action

The important thing to remember is that neither physical activity nor language alone is action. By themselves they're either mere activity or mere talk. Words and movement are there for a larger purpose: to serve the action, to reveal it, to convey it to the audience. …Action is what a character wants. It is the wanting itself.

– The Playwright's Guidebook by Stuart Spencer.

Types of Action

1. Discovery Action. Aristotle calls this the greatest of all dramatic actions and he's probably right, because this discovery action is the major action of such great plays from Oedipus Rex right down to every detective story, murder mystery, and whodunit ever written, where the chief interest is to find something out. We watch as someone, usually the protagonist, passes from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge about something.

In the modern theatre, one of the most moving examples of a discovery action occurs in The Miracle Worker by William Gibson, in the last scene of the play, when the child Helen Keller discovers the relation between the spelling of the word "water" and the sensation of water being poured out onto her hand from the water pump. At that instant the child passes from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, as she discovers the connection between language and reality. It is an overwhelmingly powerful moment for us also, as we witness this discovery by the blind-deaf-mute child.

2. Seduction Action. Someone wants to get someone to do something. Sexual seduction is the most obvious example of this action, and in the pursuit of a sexual seduction some characters will do just about anything to achieve their objective-they will flatter, lie, brag, threaten, beg, blackmail, cajole, sometimes even promise marriage! But this seduction action can operate on many other levels besides the purely sexual. It will be behind any major persuasion or con job or sales pitch with which one person is trying to get another person to do something.

3. Goal Action. Someone can want something very specific, like money or power or status, and this will function strongly as a major dramatic action. A banker wants a million dollars; Macbeth wants to be king; a woman wants to go to London-all these goals will make for strong actions in the characters who pursue them, so long as the characters go after their objectives strongly and clearly.

4. Revenge Action. For some reason, audiences will always accept someone's desire to get even with someone else as one of the strongest dramatic actions. Whether in classical tragedy like the Oresteia of Aeschylus, or in a blood tragedy like The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, or in a play like Hamlet by William Shakespeare, any lone individual's wish for revenge will always play strongly onstage.

Similarly, family vendettas and blood feuds like that between the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet, or the Hatfields and the McCoys in our mid-Atlantic states; or the dead fish that are sent out as hit contracts among the Mafia; or the lethal street brawls between rival gangs in West Side Story-this type of revenge action will always be powerful and engage our deepest sympathies and identification with someone who wants to get even with someone else.

5. Escape Action. Someone says, "I want to get the hell out of here!" It could be a spectacular jail break, or a flight from a totalitarian state, or a psychological escape action as when Nora walks out on her bad marriage in Ibsen's A Doll's House. Whatever the form, an escape action will always involve an audience strongly if it is pursued strongly.

6. Testing Action. This is a common action that takes place every day of our lives: we test the people around us, to find out where they are coming from. And when the stakes are high enough, the testing action works strongly in spy stories and plays that take place under an oppressive tyranny, when characters have to find out whether other characters are on the same side or not. This happens with many of the minor characters in Macbeth such as Lennox and the Lord, and also in The Private Life of The Master Race by Bertolt Brecht. One's life can depend on finding out whether one trusts someone else, and the only way of finding out whether the other person is trustworthy or not is to test that person in as many ways as possible.

7. "Getting to Know You" Action. This is a variation of the seduction action and the testing action, but it is a distinct action in its own right. Someone is trying to get to know someone else. It's not necessary for there to be a seduction involved, or very high stakes-one is simply trying to break the ice. An excellent example of this "getting to know you" action takes place in the park bench scene in Molnar's Liliom, and also in the soda fountain scene in act two of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

8. Crossroads Choice Action. This is an action in which a character tries to decide between two major actions that lie ahead of him. It gives the illusion that a character is able to step back and freely choose which major action he will pursue in the play.

Hamlet does this in the famous "To be or not to be" speech, when he seems to be trying to decide whether to kill himself or not.

This crossroads choice action is extremely perilous, as it tends to make a major character appear to be neurotic and unable to make up his own mind about which major action he should pursue. indeed, both of the above speeches are notoriously difficult for any actor to deliver onstage, and it has nothing to do with the speeches being world-famous, or consisting of exalted poetry-it is because the character seems to be questioning whether or not he should continue on with his major action, and for an actor to play that form of detached self-examination removes him from the through line of the major action and makes him seem less dramatic and motivated.

9. Reprise Action. Just as in some musicals a composer writes a "reprise" number to restate the important melodies that have taken place in the course of the musical, so in a play sometimes a playwright will have a character restate the important circumstances and stakes that pertain to his dramatic situation. This happens most conspicuously in Hamlet, when Hamlet keeps going back over his major action and tries to remind himself of why he should do what he has to do:

10. Vengeance!

The above list of recurrent actions does not exhaust all the possible major actions one can use in playwriting, but it does include the most common major actions that keep coming back again and again in almost all plays.

ADVICE FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
Train yourself to see drama as action, and try to create strong wants and desires and objectives for all the characters in your play.

SUGGESTED READING: Stanislavsky: My Life in Art, Meridian, 1948.

from The Art Of The Playwright By William Packard

In addition to these major actions, there are a few more sophisticated minor actions that can occur in playwriting. Some of these minor actions are like the tricky gambits or ploys that people use in the games they play with each other in real life, to manipulate and maneuver situations. That does not make them any less valid as dramatic actions-in fact, if a playwright can reproduce them convincingly, it should cause a shudder of recognition in an audience. Following is a list of some of these more sophisticated minor actions:

1. False Action. A character indicates his major action is one thing, whereas in fact the major action is really another thing, The audience may or may not be aware that it is a false action, and indeed, sometimes the character himself may or may not be aware that it is a false action.
At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, Richard III announces to the audience that his major action is to kill just about everyone onstage and prove what a villain he is, yet to everyone onstage he pretends he is an extraordinarily virtuous person. Here the audience is aware of the falseness of Richard's action, so it will await the discovery by the other characters onstage that Richard is, indeed, a villain.

But in The Three Sisters by Chekhov, although the play begins with both Olga and Irina announcing that they want to go to Moscow, as it unfolds we in the audience realize that they are doing nothing much to advance that major action. We gradually realize it is a false action, and they must really want something else.

In almost every murder mystery or detective story, one of the characters will have to have a false action, because he is a criminal who is masking his real major action-otherwise there would be no mystery to unravel.

A playwright should realize that false actions are extremely tricky things to play with, and they must be carefully controlled and executed. Otherwise it may seem that a character is merely being neurotic and indecisive, which will simply confuse and alienate an audience.

2. Withheld Action. Like a false action, a withheld action is not immediately apparent as the major action of a character. This is because the withheld action is kept in reserve, to be revealed at some later time in the play. This will occur when it is not safe for a character to reveal his true major action, or when the character chooses to delay it for some other reason. An example of this occurs in King Lear, when both Edgar and the Fool have to withhold their true action of loyalty to Lear during the third and fourth acts of the play, while Lear is going mad on the heath. Only in the fifth act can both Edgar and the Fool reveal their major action, which is keeping allegiance to their King.

3. Sleeper Action. Like the withheld action and the false action, a sleeper action will be a temporarily suspended action which may look like another action. An example of this occurs in The Duchess of Malfl by John Webster, when Duke Ferdinand is described as someone who
will seem to sleep o'the bench
only to entrap offenders in their answers . . .

In other words, Ferdinand pretends he is not paying attention to someone in his court, in order to catch him in some mistake so he can sentence him to death. Cats do this with mice all the time, as part of their playing with them.

4. "Letting out Line" Action. This term is taken from fishing, where one deliberately lets out line on a large fish and allows it to swim away, in order to tire the fish so it can then be pulled in more easily. This action seems to let the fish win the contest, whereas in reality it deceives the fish, making doubly sure that it will be netted. An example of this "letting out line" action occurs in Othello, when lago seems to allow his insinuations to drift and wander, in order to let Othello "tire" himself out in seeming to see through them, before lago begins to go to work in earnest on Othello.

5. "Treading Water" Action. This term is taken from swimming, where one sometimes stops swimming and treads water for a time, in order to conserve energy. It is an action, but only in reference to some other major action which one has temporarily suspended. An example of this "treading water" action is in Hamlet, where a good deal of the shorter soliloquys and asides are simply Hamlet's way of conserving energy before he goes back to his major action which is avenging his murdered father.

With all of these recurrent major and minor actions, the success of the actions will always depend on how strongly and clearly they are pursued by the dramatic characters, and on how much the characters really want the actions.

ADVICE FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
Train yourself to see drama as action, and try to create strong wants and desires and objectives for all the characters in your play.
SUGGESTED READING
Stanislavsky: My Life in Art, Meridian, 1948.

from The Art Of The Playwright By William Packard