CHAPTER TWO

The Six Elements of Aristotle

Aristotle's theory of drama, his Poetics, was written over two thousand years ago. Aristotle was writing primarily about classical Greek tragedy in the fifth century B.C., but his blueprint for a play is as useful now as it was then. Most successful plays still follow Aristotle's dictates and include his six elements. Keep them in mind as you write your play. The six elements are translated variously from the Greek as

action or plot

character

thought or ideas

language, diction or verbal expression

music or song

spectacle, image or visual adornment

For our purposes we will choose the following definitions but alter Aristotle's order:

character

action

ideas

language

music

spectacle

Most playwrights today believe in the primacy of character. Aristotle did not. He believed plot, or action, was the most important aspect of the play. In one large sense, he was right. When viewed from the perspective of the audience, the plot is the most important aspect. When an audience recalls a play, what stays in the mind more than anything else is what happened—and that's the plot, the action. The audience perspective is absolutely vital to keep in mind, but the composition of a script by a playwright does not necessarily follow the same order as in its viewing and appreciation by an audience. An audience may remember the actions first, but the playwright must start with character.

CHARACTER

Remember one of our simple rules from the previous chapter: All your characters must compel the audience's attention. While it's been said that audiences often go to the theater to see reflections of themselves, they don't go to see duller reflections of themselves.

A compelling character can be a king or a carpenter, a monster or a marriage broker. The title the character wears doesn't matter. Interest is engendered by what a character does. The most interesting character in your play is the person with the greatest needs, the biggest problems, and the greatest potential for action. She may be seductive, funny or flawed. He may be courageous, cruel or kind. The first test is yourself: Does your character interest you? They have to fascinate you. So an initial question you should ask yourself is, What kind of people fascinate you in real life?

What Makes a Character Compelling?

Your aim is to create characters an audience wants to spend time with. Your aim is to create heroes, villains, and every complicated variation of human nature in between—people your audience will want to join on a journey, root for, gasp at, pity and boo. Passive characters are never interesting. Playwright Marsha Norman, in her interview at the end of this book, says mat the most interesting characters are those who “take control of their own lives.” In most plays, that control is hard-won. It is the result of struggle.

Most characters who compel our attention and interest are sympathetic. But an audience isn't fascinated only by good-guy heroes. Other great characters found in the history of drama include “The Villain” (Claudius in Hamlet; Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America); “The Love Interest” (a girl if it's Juliet or Ophelia; a boy if it's Romeo or The Glass Menagerie's Gentleman Caller); “The Friend of the Hero” (Horatio in Hamlet); “The Catalytic Character” who comes into the plot at a key moment to act as a springboard for a new development or action (Polonius, whom Hamlet accidentally murders, in Hamlet; the sickly Horace Giddens on whose heart condition so many financial futures depend in The Little Foxes); “The Comic Relief” (the porter in Macbeth); “The Messenger” (every Greek play ever written); “The Surprise, or Deus Ex Machina” (the disguised witness in Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution; “The God Who Saves the Day at the Last Minute in a Greek Tragedy”); and scores of minor characters.

What is the key relationship between the audience and a character? Identification. Audiences want characters who will take them on a journey both foreign and familiar. Characters in situations the audience recognizes—births, courtships, marriages, affairs, divorces, illnesses, battles, professional struggles, deaths, financial and family crises. Characters who act out and personify the hopes, dreams and ambitions of the audience. Characters who are the audience's agents in the fictional world of the stage, acting out our desire for romance, for revenge, for retribution, for control.

A strong character must define herself early in a play if the author wants to hook an audience's interest. Oscar Hammerstein II, the great lyricist and playwright who collaborated with Richard Rodgers to create such landmarks as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and The King and I, said that the lead character in a musical always has to sing an “I Want Song” within the first twenty minutes of the show. The “I Want Song”—or “The 8:15 Number”—is usually the second song in the show. It defines the character's needs and wants. In the Stephen Sondheim/Jule Styne/Arthur Laurents musical Gypsy, the “I Want Song” is Mama Rose's “Some People,” the song that details Rose's ambitions for her daughters and for her own career in show business. It's the song that tells us who she is, where she's been, and where she wants to go. In the Frank Loesser/Abe Burrows/Jo Swerling musical Guys and Dolls, the “I Want Song” is “Oldest Established,” introducing the gambler Nathan Detroit who has to find a hideout for his next craps game. And in the landmark hit A Chorus Line, the “I Want Song” is “God, I Hope I Get It”—the opening number of the show that introduces the dancers who desperately “need this job.”

Of course the “I Want Song” isn't just found in musicals. It's really the “I Want Moment.” In Shakespeare's Richard III it's the very first soliloquy or monologue: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.” The speech describes Richard's wounded ego, his warped wit, his intelligence, and his ambition to become king. In Hamlet, it's Hamlet's Act One, Scene Two soliloquy that begins “O! that this too too solid flesh would melt.” It's this speech that depicts Hamlet's pain, anger and resentment at his mother's marriage to his uncle Claudius—and Claudius' usurpation of the Danish throne—so soon after his father's mysterious death.

When one character's “I Want” comes up against another character's “I Want,” you have dramatic conflict. In musical terms, the two “I Want Songs” clashing together creates disharmony. In August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, the constant refrain is “I want to sell the piano!” followed by “Well, I don't want to sell the piano!” In The Odd Couple, it's Felix Unger's “We have to have a neat home” butting up against Oscar Madison's “I like being a slob.” So while a character can be interesting because of her background, her psychology, her humor, her way of talking, the most interesting thing about a character is what she wants, how badly she wants it, and what her actions will be to get it.

Interest is generated both by the audience's familiarity with the character's goal and by the actions the character performs to achieve that goal. Are Hamlet's goals familiar to the average audience? I'll admit there aren't many of us who can identify with the plight of a Danish prince. Few of us have witnessed our mother marry our uncle after our father's murder, nor lost our own chance at becoming king. And we seldom bump into the ghosts of our relatives on castle battlements. But we all know what it's like to engage in internecine battles within a family; we all understand jealousy, betrayal and injustice; and although there aren't real ghosts in real life, aren't we all haunted by the recollections of lost loved ones to whom we wanted to speak one last time, and to whom we wanted to prove something? Few of us are the villainous Richard III, but many of us are ambitious; many of us want a better job, a promotion, a chance to shine in power. In Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois' desperate need to hold onto the illusion of her family plantation at Belle Reeve in the face of battered reality may be foreign to many audiences, but the desire for a lost home, the desire for protection, the desire for grace and beauty is one shared by every human being.

Are there some goals that are better than others? Sure.

Concrete goals are always better than abstract ones. What are some of the things characters in great plays want? Sex, money, power, love, a jewel, a key, an answer, a job, a fortune, a crown, revenge, truth, justice. Which of these are abstract goals? Which are concrete? Abstract goals are not tangible, they cannot be material. They are concepts. They are important and worthy of a character's desire, but they have no stage presence. Concrete wants/needs/desires/goals are tangible. You can hold them in your hand, touch them, feel them, see them.

But, you argue, isn't the pursuit of justice a greater goal than finding a bagful of money? Not in drama. Drama takes place in the land of the concrete. But, you argue, Hamlet wanted justice, Hamlet wanted revenge. Aren't those abstract goals? Yes, but Hamlet's desire for justice and revenge was not generalized; Hamlet's desire was specific: to prove Claudius a killer and then kill him. That's very concrete. Goals like that are the best kinds of dramatic goals: concrete goals (prove Claudius is a killer, then kill him) moving the play's action and depicting the play's characters, with big abstract concepts (justice, revenge) standing behind them. To write a character who just generally wants justice is to write a character who grasps at the air.

A brilliantly drawn villain like Regina in Lillian Hellman's melodrama The Little Foxes certainly has abstract goals, but all of her actions, her dramatic wants are about specifics. She wants money, control of the family business, a new husband, a new city to live in, and she wants her daughter to stay with her. These are concrete wants and goals, but they are connected to abstract ideas about love, sex, resentment, revenge, power and the needs of Regina's sick, hungry soul. When Regina famously sits by and watches her husband Horace suffer a heart attack—watches him as he pleads with her to get the medicine that may save his life—Regina has a concrete desire: to kill her husband. She allows his death. She does not act. What she does not do becomes the most violent action in the play.

Positive goals are better than negative goals. For example, you might want to write a play about a philosopher who is trying to disprove the existence of God. To disprove God may seem like a fascinating goal, but there are problems with it. Does the problem have to do with religion? No. It doesn't have to do with disproving God; it has to do with (improving. It's negative. Its dynamic is less magnetic, both for the character and for the audience. In our “disproving God” example, the goal is weak because:

• it is abstract and amorphous;

• it is, by definition, impossible to prove a negative;

• it is difficult to depict in concrete dramatic terms.

But, you say, Richard III has negative goals. Wrong. Richard III has nothing but positive goals—to “get” the crown. True, he's a villain, he kills people along the way, but his goal, from his point of view, is a positive one.

Active goals are better than reactive goals. If your character's primary goal is to escape, to run away, you have a weak goal. From Shakespeare's As You Like It to the movies North by Northwest and The Fugitive, drama has often depicted characters in flight. But if your character is running away from something, he must also be running toward something. Running away is reactive. Running toward is active. That's why movie heroes on the run from the law (reactive goal) are also trying to prove their innocence and find the real culprit (active goal). “Will our hero be caught?” and “Will our hero catch the real killer?” is more interesting than simply “Will our hero be caught?”

To gauge a character's level of compelling interest, you'll need to know that character well. I'll make the argument that the best, most organic and safest way to develop characters would be to create detailed biographies, backgrounds, psychology for the character before writing or outlining the play. Once the playwright understands what her character will or will not do under a multitude of circumstances, only then can she proceed to construct a story based on the character's actions.

One surefire way of assuring an audience's interest in your character is to make him or her likable. Even a glancing look at the history of great dramatic characters will tell us a few basic points that should be remembered by every dramatist:

• Most memorable dramatic characters are likable.

• If they aren't likeable in a traditionally understood way (more below), they're passionate or witty or magnetic.

• If they're villainous monsters, they're monsters with charisma.

• They do great things (greatness within context, of course).

Likability is tricky. It's not the same as being “nice.” For example, we like Richard III. Why? He's a killer, to be sure. He murders his entire family to get the English crown. He even has two little boys smothered in a tower. But he's been bruised by life (that humpback, that deformed hand), and we pity him. He's obviously the most intelligent political thinker in the court, so we sympathize with his wounded sense of justice. He's witty. He's funny. He's charming. And—this is vitally important—he does extravagant things and gets away with them. We wish we could too. Sure. We like Richard.

In Hedda Gabler we like Hedda. Why? She's cruel to her husband, her in-laws, her old school friend, her lover, everyone. But, like Richard III, she does things we wish we could do. She fights against constraints. She bucks the claustrophobic world in which she lives. Most important, Hedda desires beauty and passion—the fully lived, fully experienced world of love, intellect and fire. What audience member hasn't desired that? Sure. We like Hedda Gabler.

Character in Action

When you're sure you have an interesting character, your next step is depicting this character to your audience. “Action is character,” goes the old saying, “as character is action.” They cannot be separated. For example:

Character is action—A man conditioned by his upbringing to cut corners, look for easy ways out and be greedy steals a suitcase full of money. The kind of character determines the action.

Action is character—A man steals a suitcase full of money; therefore we conjecture he may be the kind of man conditioned to cut corners, look for easy ways out and be greedy. The action determines the kind of character.

A fictional character is depicted onstage by the evidence of that person's actions. The audience acts as a detective. The audience looks for clues to understand a stage character, just as they look for clues to understand a real person. There are three ways to display your character onstage:

1. What a character says about herself.

2. What other characters say about her.

3. What the character does.

All three are useful ways of depicting character. But is one of these more important than any of the others? Yes. Number three: what a character does. If I hear a man say he is honest, and I hear his friend say he is honest, I may well surmise that he is honest … until I see him steal a suitcase full of money. His actions prove him dishonest, despite what he says or what others say. To stoop to a cliche: “Actions speak louder than words.”

Aristotle identified the main character, the hero of the tragedy, as the protagonist. In its various Greek definitions, a protagonist is the “carrier of the action”; an actor who plays the first part; the chief personage of the drama; the principal character in the plot; one who contends for a prize; a combatant; an actor. Break up the word: Pro—to be “for” something; Agonize—to “struggle.” To struggle for something.

In classical tragedy, the protagonist was a high figure—a king, a prince, a royal personage: Oedipus, Hamlet, Othello. He was a noble figure with a tragic flaw—pride, jealousy, ignorance. He fought against great odds (events, people, nature, the gods) and was eventually destroyed by them. In a contemporary play, the main character need not be a good person, but the protagonist's problems, goals, intelligence, charms and weaknesses must be worthy of our interest and our time.

Most great plays have one strong protagonist, but some great plays have two, three, four or more strong, active characters working toward their goals. For example, Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning Love! Valour! Compassion! concerns seven gay men who spend an entire summer together. Each of the men passionately pursues his own goals. In one sense, every character in your play is the protagonist, with strong goals and a rich, complex personal history. If you think of the protagonist as “the ball carrier,” or a football player, and if you think of your play as a football game, then the point from one end zone to the other side's goalpost is the trajectory of your plot. Your protagonist(s) must get the ball across that goal line. The other characters are there to help or, in most cases, to hinder. The job of everyone playing against the protagonist is to stop his progress down the field, tackle him, confuse him, and take the ball away. How the ball carrier plays the game determines the kind of player he is.

When you think about your plays and the characters who people them, you probably think in terms of lead characters and supporting characters. This makes sense. Hamlet is a lead; Ophelia, Polonius and Claudius are supporting characters. In Hedda Gabler, Hedda is a lead; her boring husband Tesman, her lover Eilert Lovborg, and the sardonic Judge Brack are supporting characters. In The Odd Couple, Felix and Oscar are leads; the poker buddies and the Pigeon sisters are supporting characters. You've probably heard the old saying “There are no small parts, just small actors.” Let me share one of my favorite theater anecdotes to illustrate a point. It involves the first New York production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Maiden, in addition to a number of actors in smaller parts. The roles of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski are obviously the leads; in a classical sense, Blanche is the active protagonist (a bruised soul seeking shelter), and Stanley is the active antagonist (a magnetic brute jealously guarding his invaded territory). But there were ten other actors in that play, portraying neighbors, drinking buddies, others. One of these ten actors played “the doctor,” who, with his nurse, comes to take the shattered Blanche away to the sanitorium in the last minutes of the play. It's a tiny part, no more than a line or two. It is the doctor to whom Blanche says the famous line, “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” One day a friend bumped into this actor on the street. The actor told his friend that he was in a new play by Tennessee Williams. The friend asked the actor what the play was about. The actor said, “It's about a doctor who comes to take a woman to a sanitorium.”

This is a very telling story. It's funny, of course; a story about an actor's ego. But it's illustrative of how an actor should think of the character he's playing. It's also illustrative of how playwrights might think about all their characters.

Characters in Conflict

What do your characters consist of? Wants. Needs. Desires. Sure, but what else? Fears. Phobias. Addictions. Weaknesses. How smart are they? (Smart is always better than dumb.) How shrewd? How clever? How devious? How charming? How funny? How ethical? How practical? How malleable? How pathetic? How willing are they to negotiate? Some playwrights and teachers refer to all dramatic conflict as negotiation. What will one character do or say to get something from another character?

I'll argue that the reason many plays fail—even ones written by talented writers—is because the author hasn't given her characters

1. Strong enough goals,

2. Difficult enough obstacles,

3. Talents and opportunity.

Why do I stress “talents” and “opportunities”?

Take Hamlet. Hamlet is very intelligent. He's clever, witty and ingenious. He pretends to be mad so that he may spy on the court and arouse less suspicion. These are talents. But Shakespeare also gave him opportunities—the arrival of the players is such an opportunity. It's happenstance that they arrive while Hamlet is conducting his clandestine investigation. But their presence at Elsinore gives Hamlet the idea to stage the play that will “catch the conscience of the king.” When Hamlet is later sent to England via ship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the audience knows what Hamlet does not: that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry a letter from Claudius to the English king ordering Hamlet's execution upon arrival. Hamlet is smart enough to find that letter, open it, and change its contents so that it will order Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's execution instead of his own. But that's not enough. Shakespeare also provides Hamlet with the opportunity he needs—an attack on the ship by pirates. Hamlet escapes onto the pirate's ship, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on to England and their doom.

The successful playwright knows how to combine her character's skills with a judicious sprinkling of opportunity. A smart playwright won't overuse either of these, however. A protagonist who has a successful strategy for every obstacle is a combination of Einstein, Superman and James Bond. And a playwright who tosses in nick-of-time opportunity after nick-of-time opportunity to save her hero courts accusations of contrivance. As you plan your play, you have to keep asking yourself: What should happen? What could happen? As each obstacle is overcome, does a new obstacle rise up in the protagonist's way?

The protagonist's enemy is the antagonist, the “opposer of the action.” The antagonist is anyone or anything that tries to stop the protagonist, take the ball, or get in the way. A good antagonist is as powerful or more so than the protagonist.

• A good antagonist is a strong villain—Claudius in Hamlet.

• A good antagonist is a loved one—George and Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• A good antagonist is fate—in classical Greek tragedy, a god.

• A good antagonist is society—the oppressive and corrupt community of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People; the ancient city of Thebes in Sophocles' Oedipus.

• A good antagonist is weather—the draught in N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker.

• A good antagonist is chance, luck, circumstance—a random act; a mad sniper who kills the hero's friend at a key moment in the play is acting as an antagonist.

• A good antagonist is oneself—Hamlet's inability to kill Claudius when the villainous king is praying; Hedda Gabler's fear of scandal; Shelly Levene's foolish braggadocio that destroys him at the conclusion of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.

Use all these potential antagonists. But the best antagonist is always another character. Why? The heat generated by the conflict between human beings can't be matched by the heat generated by a person and an object, a person and nature, a person and an abstract concept. Recall from your own experience the battles you've fought with friends, family, rivals. Now recall battles you've fought with broken-down cars, snow and contradictory philosophical theories. There's no contest.

A writing exercise I use to teach this point involves a conflict between two characters in a locked room. The two characters must do battle over an object that is of value to one or both of the characters. The object might be valuable in and of itself (a sack of money, a diamond ring, a famous painting); it might be valuable for its information (an incriminating letter, a secret report, a tape recording); it might be valuable for personal or sentimental reasons (a photograph, a diary, a souvenir). Each character must act to win possession of the object.

In a recent class, I encountered three versions of this scene. In the first, a young woman and an old man battled over a painting hidden inside the bedroom wall of the old man's house. In the second, a spurned lover and his landlord argued over a love letter. In the third, two women fought over an article one of them wanted to have published in a newspaper. In each case, the exposition was handled deftly; the characters were drawn in strong, clear strokes; the revelation of the object was organic and natural; and the conflict was joined early. But each writer fell into a similar trap. Once the conflict was joined (“I need to get that painting”; “Let me see that letter”; “You can't publish that article”), the character who most wanted the object gave it up to the other—usually after saying as little as, “I don't really want to give it up, but … oh, all right!” Just when the scene threatened to get interesting.

The first question I ask these writers is: “When did you feel the air go out of the scene?” In other words, when did the dramatic tension slacken? It slackened rather quickly. The next question I ask is: If you were the character, and you wanted that painting, that letter, that article, would you give in so early and so easily? Wouldn't you use every strategy at your disposal? Wouldn't you lie, steal, commit murder if need be? Often the writers respond to this question in the following manner: “Well, it's just a painting/letter/article.”

“Just” is the one word you must never use when referring to your writing and your characters. “Just” is a small word. A weak word. A shrug. It means you have no confidence in the magnitude of your object and its value. It means you have a half-hearted approach to your characters. There is no “just” in Hamlet. In a “just” play, characters achieve their goals easily, or they shrug them off. In Just Hamlet, Hamlet doesn't bother with the ghost's order for revenge. He goes back to school at Wittenburg and becomes a classics major.

This is what dull, lazy, weak, unimaginative protagonists do. Dull, lazy, weak, unimaginative characters cannot propel action forward, cannot pursue their goals against obstacles, and cannot carry the ball down the field. And they certainly can't make an audience want to come along for the ride.

Protagonists and antagonists alike, your characters are stand-ins for yourself and your audience. Remember: We go to the theater to be entertained and to understand our world. What better guide to this world than characters who make us want to join them? It doesn't take a genius to tell the difference between a likable character and an unlikable one; between a witty woman and a dull one; between a vital, active man and a placid one. Audiences want to connect to the characters onstage. The majority of memorable stage characters are successfully rendered because the author of the play created a person who loves, desires, fears, commits crimes, seeks joy, knows sadness, and acts with every fiber of his being. Characters in plays are stand-ins for the audience, striking back at oppressive structures in life—society, morality, events, other people. We all want to be extraordinary. So create characters who do extraordinary things.

The extraordinary can be saving the universe. It can also be giving an old enemy a second chance. It can be a duel to the death or a decision to go on a date. Many onstage acts are ostensibly minor but, in context, resoundingly major.

A character is best seen in motion, in action, in change and evolution. Contrary to some opinions, all successful stage characters do change, as do all people. Change fascinates. “Change is,” as Oscar Wilde said, “the only sure thing.” If a successful character does not change, that character's will to maintain a status quo must be equally fascinating.

How the dramatist displays a character in motion and moving toward change is shown through dramatic conflict and action.

EXERCISES

1. Create a character. A protagonist. Perhaps it's a character based on a real-life person, perhaps it's one you've imagined. In one to two pages, write a brief biographical sketch of this person. You are creating a fictional character, but don't be afraid to base this character on a person or persons from real life. Maybe the character is you. Maybe it's someone you hardly know. Choose the character's birthdate, birthplace, and where the character grew up. Choose the character's family, social and economic background. Next describe a few key events in that character's life—deaths, winning the lottery, childhood scars. Now look at your biography. Is it interesting enough? Could the events and actions you've imagined be altered to create a more interesting person? Is there any hint of that rebellious spirit so much in evidence in Richard III or Hedda Gabler? Revise the biography. Play with different possibilities, different actions and events. Has your biography brought your character to a point in his or her life where a potential high-pressure crisis is suggested? The kind of crisis that could start a play?

2. Create a concrete goal for your character. A want. A need. A desire. Just one. Concrete, not abstract. Write it down.

3. “Character is action; action is character.” Create an action that tells us what kind of person your character is. (Example: A young boy steals a purse from an old lady.) Write the action down. Is the action connected to a concrete goal? What does it show you about your character? Does he get what he wants? Or does he run into an obstacle?

4. Create an antagonist for your protagonist. Although we noted that an antagonist can take many forms, for this exercise make the antagonist another person. Create another biography. Rework your biographies in a way that will bring both your protagonist and your antagonist together into the same room or space. Now rework the action from exercise number three. Place both characters in the same action. What happens when both people are aware of the concrete goal? Define the conflict in one sentence.

ACTION

Plot is the arrangement of actions designed to tell the story of a play. The simplest way to describe any plot is to list every action of the play, starting with the first moment and moving to the last. Plot, as we have noted before, depends on tension and suspense, created by the playwright's organization of actions and information and by the playwright's posing of questions. In constructing an effective, intriguing plot, a playwright must create, prolong, subvert and satisfy audience expectations.

In literary theory, this arrangement of actions is called the “strip tease.” While one doesn't want to emphasize the sexual aspect of performance more than is necessary, it's important to note that theater and sex, drama and romance, share certain aspects: There is initial interest; followed by a development of attraction; followed by an involvement with the subject; followed by the setting of a goal; then a pursuit; with obstacles to overcome; generating suspense and tension (all enjoyably frustrating); finally ending in success and satisfaction.

This is a gross oversimplification of the parallels, but a dramatist who does not see the similarities between sex and drama will probably not make the connection between a lot of life experiences to art. It's amazing to note the number of real-life activities and experiences that resemble drama, in shape, in sequence, in their expectations, suspense and satisfaction. Plots are constructed to re-create this sense of experience along recognizable lines, whether or not the audience is consciously aware of the parallels. On an unconscious level, plots are a working out of life patterns, patterns based on the experiences and expectations of human beings. Sex, eating, sports, war, trials, birth, even the aging process.

Our youth is exposition; who we are, where we are, when we are, what we are going to do. Our maturation—for most people 75 percent of their time on earth—is the conflict and rising action. Who among us does not expect that the great middle period of our lives (from our late adolescence through retirement) is fraught with questions, tensions, conflicts, tests, failures, resolve, successes, climaxes and understanding? Our old age is resolution—when conflicts, for the most part, are resolved, and we make our peace with the world. If we see life as having this shape—or at the very least desire this shape, crave this order from our chaotic lives—then it stands to reason that playwrights will design plots along the lines of that perceived shape.

Actions vs. Activities

It's easy to confuse effective dramatic action with activities. Activities are the dramatic equivalent of busy-work. They may look like actions (a fistfight) and they may sound like actions (a shouting match), but if they don't cause a reaction, then they're not actions. A dramatic action is an act performed by a character which in turn causes another character to perform yet another action. Good drama builds a chain of such actions from the beginning of the play right up to the end. If the fistfight doesn't lead to anything, it's not an action. If the shouting match doesn't change anyone, it's not an action. But if the fistfight prompts one of the characters to plot his revenge, or if the shouting match causes one of the characters to leave her home, they're vital dramatic actions.

Plots and Subplots

Can a play have more than one plot? Yes. But be careful here. In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote about the “Unities.” One of these is the “Unity of Action,” meaning that a good play has one central plot, one dramatic through-line. Good drama needs a solid spine to hold it together. But many plays also have one, two, three or four subplots. It's risky to write a play with lots of subplots; too many plotlines can make a play blurry and confusing. The dramas of Anton Chekhov contain multiple plot-lines, but there's always a central plot to bring all the other lines of action together. In The Cherry Orchard, it's the sale of the estate. In the nineteenth-century French farces of Georges Feydeau, we may see numerous mistresses, gigolos, hotel clerks, maids, detectives, furious spouses and errant gendarmes—each pursuing his own goal—but in the end they all intertwine and connect at the central love-triangle, the most important plotline of the play. Subplots are best observed in larger canvass plays with a greater number of characters—Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Congreve, Kaufmann and Hart, and many American musicals.

We know what the function of a main plot is. It is an arrangement of actions designed to tell the story of the play. As we'll detail more fully in the chapter on Structure, the plot propels the characters forward from inciting incident to point of attack, posing dramatic questions, prompting goals and obstacles, leading to complications, taking advantage of other actions, surprises, revelations and reversals, as the characters move through the play to a crisis, and then race forward to the climax.

The function of a subplot is twofold:

1. To provide a separate and much smaller plot with its own forward action, moving toward its own climax and conclusion;

2. To provide dramatic and thematic resonance to the main plot.

A perfect example is King Lear. The main plot concerns Lear's decision to divide his kingdom into three parts. In doing so, however, he demands that his three daughters profess their love for him in court. His evil daughters Goneril and Regan praise him effusively, but his beloved daughter Cordelia refuses to acquiesce to his grandiose wish. Infuriated, Lear banishes her, and his kingdom is instead divided between Goneril and Regan. Eventually Lear is stripped of his army, and escapes into the wilderness as Goneril and Regan plan a battle against Cordelia who has returned to rescue Lear. At the climax, the armies converge, and Lear dies cradling the dead body of his beloved Cordelia in his arms.

The subplot involves Lear's prime minister, Gloucester. Gloucester's legitimate son is Edgar; Edmund is his bastard, born to another woman. Edmund manages to convince Gloucester that Edgar has plotted to kill him. Edgar flees to the wilderness disguised as “Poor Tom,” a madman. Gloucester is captured by Goneril, Regan and Edmund; he is blinded by them, and thrown into the widerness—where he is found by “Poor Tom.” The blind Gloucester doesn't know that this “madman” is his son. But Edgar protects his blind father until Gloucester's death.

Obviously, the themes of the subplot—rejection, forgiveness, parents turned against children and children against parents—complement those of the main plot. What's most important, however, is that the action of the Gloucester subplot connects with the Lear main plot and propels it forward. Here's how:

• the bastard Edmund joins forces with Goneril and Regan;

• Goneril and Regan capture and blind Gloucester;

• Gloucester and “Poor Tom” meet Lear during the storm;

• after Gloucester's death, Edgar tosses aside his “Poor Tom” disguise, battles the villainous Edmund to the death, and leads Cordelia's army to victory.

The subplot takes up approximately one-fifth of the action of King Lear. The main plot takes up the rest. The plots are brought together not only to make a thematic point, but to drive the action toward its climax and conclusion. A subplot must assist the main plot. It must help.

In The Front Page, for example, the main plot concerns Walter Burns trying to get Hildy Johnson to stay on his newspaper long enough to write the story of the Earl Williams escape. But early in the play the villainous sheriff and mayor are alone onstage in the jail's press room. Williams has just escaped, and the police are gunning for him. The mayor wants to make sure Williams is killed. Then a man enters. His name is Pettibone. He has a message from the governor. It is a reprieve for Earl Williams. The mayor can't let this reprieve be delivered. So the two corrupt officials send the simple, sweet-natured Pettibone off on an “assignment”—to visit a “house,” a bordello the mayor controls. Pettibone trots away, not knowing that his visit will cause the reprieve to arrive too late. This is a short scene, a page or two. Very soon thereafter we return to the action of Walter Burns and Hildy, the rest of the reporters, and the love story of Hildy and his fiancee. Earl Williams shows up in the press room, and Hildy hides him in a rolltop desk. The police arrive. Williams is discovered and taken off to be hanged. The mayor and the sheriff think they're about to put Walter and Hildy in jail.

And then Mr. Pettibone—drunk, but still reeking of civic duty—returns to deliver the reprieve and announce that he can't be bought! Walter and Hildy realize what's happened and turn the tables on the sheriff and the mayor. The Front Page's Pettibone subplot, while taking up very little time in the play (two or three pages), has returned to connect with the main plot and it has changed everything. Pettibone's two entrances are fortuitous actions, both of which propel action. In the second entrance, his return saves Walter and Hildy's skins, saves Earl Williams' life and saves the day. It's a wonderful example of an efficient and beautifully used subplot.

Think of a subplot as an action that runs parallel to the main plot and then zooms forward, changing its angle, to enter the main action near its end. A subplot, although experienced sequentially (Example: A Lear/Fool scene, followed by a Gloucester/Edmund scene, followed by a Lear scene, followed by a Gloucester/Edgar scene, etc.), is a little like a service road that runs along a major highway and then suddenly feeds into the traffic.

A CHOICE OF ACTIONS

Characters in plays, just as do human beings in real life, have choices. And the choices our characters make, like the choices we make in life, define character, propel further action, and lead to conflict and resolution.

What is important is that a character's choices—inevitable, fatal, foolish, crafty, wise—be believable. How many times have you heard audience members say of a moment in a play, “That didn't make sense” or “That wouldn't happen” or “He wouldn't do that”? Audiences bring their experience of the world to the theater. They compare the theater's “mirror up to nature” to their own reflections. When you're constructing a plot, you must consider the plausibility of your characters' actions in the light of your audience's comprehension of real-life human behavior. You must also consider these actions in light of the audience's understanding of the characters you've already created, given the history and circumstances you've assigned them.

A man may be a perfect husband, a good father, a benevolent citizen, but he kills his brother. Why? A hardened criminal may lie, cheat, steal, even kill; but he is arrested while escaping from a burglary one night when he stops to save a woman from a burning building. Why? A meek housewife may obey her husband, speak only when spoken to, and bake cookies for twenty-four hours a day, but she starts a prostitution ring. Why?

At first glance these character sketches might not seem to fit the actions described. The biographies don't match the actions. But history, psychology and biography tell just part of the story. Circumstance tells us the rest. The perfect husband knew his brother was abusing his girlfriend; the girlfriend wouldn't go to the police; the husband couldn't prove anything, so he killed his brother before he could kill his girlfriend. The criminal saw the woman in the burning building and thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. The housewife needed money, had no training, no experience, no other way to get it. One day a man offered her money for sex; she saw a way to get the money.

These are elementary examples. For a more sophisticated one, let's look at King Lear. Why necessarily does Lear banish Cordelia? Cordelia stood up to him, but can't a father put his hurt feelings aside and forgive? What circumstances does Shakespeare provide to make sense of Lear's rejection of Cordelia, this infamous, irrevocable, foolish, tragic action?

• Lear is old.

• Lear is a king.

• Lear is prideful.

• Lear is a widower.

• Lear expected Cordelia to say something else (never underestimate what a character will do when flustered, when surprised).

• Lear made the announcement of the division of his kingdom in court, in public, and Cordelia's rejection of him was a public rejection, humiliating Lear.

Take one of these circumstances away, and Lear might have forgiven Cordelia. A younger Lear might have been less needy and intolerant. A Lear who was not a king would have had less to lose or give. A Lear who was not prideful would have cared less. A Lear with a wife might have listened to a wife's counsel. A Lear satisfied by Cordelia's response would have had no reason to banish her at all. And—in what I think was Shakespeare's genius stroke—a Lear who announced the division of his kingdom privately would never have been embarrassed so publicly and hence would never have needed to display his power immediately.

Take a key circumstance away, and Lear's rejection, his brutal action, doesn't make sense. Take the action away and there is no dramatic problem, no dramatic question, no potential for mystery, tension, suspense, expectation. Take all that away and you have no play.

A good plot is filled with dozens of actions, performed by characters with wants and needs. Their actions create further actions as the characters attempt to overcome the obstacles placed in their way. All these actions must be moving in the same direction. There is usually one main plot, one major dramatic question. There may be subplots—lesser questions and actions performed by the main characters and the minor characters—but they are all vehicles moving toward the same destination. They may take different routes at different speeds, but the point of arrival is always the same.

EXERCISES

1. Using the two characters you sketched in the previous exercises, and including both the goal the protagonist desired and the obstacle the antagonist supplied, decide which of the two combatants wins the conflict. Now write down the story of this conflict in no more than three pages. Write it down as a short story or synopsis. Write down what happened before the conflict took place, write down what happened in the scene of the conflict itself, and write down what happened in its aftermath.

2. Now write the story again, but this time trim the story to its essential actions. What parts of the story are necessary? What parts are not? Start the plot as late into the story as possible. Remember: The plot of Hamlet starts long after the murder of the king, but very soon before Hamlet is set on his quest for revenge.

3. Now write the pared-down version of the story along the lines of the “strip tease.” Initial Interest; followed by a Development of Attraction; followed by an Involvement With the Subject; a Goal, a Pursuit, Obstacles to Overcome, Suspense and Tension; finally Success and Satisfaction. If you can, great. If you can't, rework the plot until it follows this “strip tease” form.

4. What choices did you make available to your characters? Did the characters choose plausible actions? What guided their choices? What were their personal qualities, attributes and flaws? What were their strengths and weaknesses? Would their choices be interesting to an audience in a dramatic sense? List the characters' qualities on paper. List the options. List the choices. Do they connect? Do they seem plausible? Are they interesting? If so, great. If not, revise.

5. Using our King Lear example, list the circumstances you created to facilitate maximum conflict, tension and action. Could the circumstances and the actions lead to further dramatic actions? List the potential further actions.

IDEAS

When Aristotle wrote about a play's idea, he was referring to what we now more often call “theme,” the abstract issues and feelings that grow out of the dramatic action. In her book A Room of One's Own, the novelist Virginia Woolf called this the “nugget”—something of value a person takes home from an artistic experience and puts on the mantle. As playwrights, we want to move our audience, to change or deepen their thoughts and feelings, to give them something to remember. Jon Jory, the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, has said that a talent he looks for in playwrights is the ability to make metaphor from ordinary human events.

There are big play ideas, and there are small play ideas. A big idea might concern “the ends of ambition,” as in Macbeth, or “racism” in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror. But there are other ideas within these plays. Ideas about war, magic, fate, children, politics and marriage permeate Macbeth. Ideas about religion, perspective, the decline of New York City, the media, revenge and justice permeate Fires in the Mirror. All successful plays contain big and small ideas.

Ideas, however, don't in themselves make a play successful. “War is bad” is a nugget, to echo Woolf. But a good play and a bad play can have the same nugget of an idea. It is not the quality of the idea that matters most, but rather the quality of the ideas as depicted by the actions of the play.

Even more basic, especially for beginning playwrights, is the question of which should come first, the ideas or the story. There's no right answer to this question.

If you happen to come up with a theme first (war is bad), the act of writing the play will be a working out of this theme. If this is the case, you are most likely the sort of writer who will intellectualize an idea, then articulate that idea in dramatic actions. If, on the other hand, you decide on the actions of the story first, you're most likely the sort who follows inner instincts, inner voices, and an innate dramatic sense. If you're talented and gifted, the actions will often lead organically to the thematic idea, whether you're conscious of it or not.

I don't believe Shakespeare sat around trying to come up with a play that would encapsulate his thinking on the subject of ambition and after a long period of diligent research and strenuous planning came up with something called Macbeth. Nor do I believe he blithely stumbled upon the story of a Scot's murderer, wrote a blood-curdling thriller, and then looked up, surprised, as if to say, “Why, I had no idea my crime story would turn into such a fascinating dissertation on the subject of ambition!”

Maybe some great playwrights start with the great thematic idea, but the truth is that good dramatists have a nose for an exciting story that has the potential for exciting ideas.

The anecdote about how Peter Shaffer came to write Equus is famous. The playwright was driving through the English countryside with a friend. The friend mentioned a story he'd heard: A stable boy had blinded six horses in a remote English village. No one ever discovered the reason for the mutilation, but it shook the small community in which it happened. Shaffer's friend died soon thereafter, and he was never able to verify the story. But he knew he'd just heard a great idea for a play. When Peter Shaffer heard that story he knew he had the makings of a play with a great mystery, strong characters, a forward-moving story and terrific theatricality. He also saw the potential for a play of ideas—ideas about passion, intellect, madness, sex, religion and the human spirit.

A playwright connected to her imagination, her intellect and her environment gathers many disparate stimuli and makes them into a play. Playwrights get their ideas from their observations of the wider world, their observations of the people around them, and their observations of their own souls—their own concerns, convictions, fears and desires.

Something that is painfully true about drama and theater is that the limits of stage time (one hour, two hours, even five hours) and the length of a play text (75–150 pages) do not lend themselves to a multitude of ideas. The novel—especially the Big Novel of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Norman Mailer—has a lot more room for ideas. The dramatist must make the most of the little time and space he has. He must be economical. He must choose the most important ideas and leave out the rest. The smart dramatist knows better than to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the idea pile.

The best plays come from ideas that are

• personal/societal/spiritual concerns of the playwright

• personal/societal/spiritual concerns of the audience

• best shown through dramatic action

There two ways to articulate an idea in a play:

1. Characters state the idea overtly—in speeches, in dialogue, either to other characters or directly to the audience. This is the direct, rhetorical approach.

2. Actions depicted in the play make the audience think of the idea. This is the Character + Conflict × Action = Ideas approach.

Of these two, always choose Number 2. This is not to say that the playwright can't speak directly to the audience. Sometimes characters come downstage, look out over the footlights at the audience and simply talk. But there is a strategy to these direct-address approaches. When will an audience be most receptive to this kind of rhetorical speech?

• At the beginning of a play, when everything is new and an audience is at one of its highest states of awareness and attentiveness (see the opening of Equus);

• Following a large action, when an audience needs a “cooling off” and is receptive to a rational means of understanding (see the choral reportage that tells the story of the Rumanian revolution in the middle section of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest);

• Preceding a pending, expected action, when audience anticipation is highest (see the prebattle St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry V);

• Between a vital question posed and a vital answer delivered, when an audience leans forward to discover the solution to a mystery or a central dramatic question (see Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, and, yes, Hamlet);

• At the end of the play, when an audience is seeking the final summation (see the last speech of Wallace Shawn's disturbing political play Aunt Dan and Lemon).

So, yes, there are strategic points in a script where the shrewd playwright can place rhetorical speeches and deliver ideas. But I will make this argument: An audience will always listen more carefully and become more personally involved with an idea when it is presented dramatically. It is one thing to hear a psychiatrist in a play say “Sometimes it's better to leave a person with her delusions than it is to cure her.” It is another to see her

• Try to Cure her patient

• Fight the delusion

• Cure the patient

• Witness the light go out of the patient's eyes

• and Reverse the painful results of “sanity”

It's the show-don't-tell principle. Remember: An audience is a detective. They look for evidence, and they believe what they can see. What they can see are the actions. The best way, then, to convince an audience of your ideas is to give them ideas embedded in the action, developed by the action, and understood in the action.

If you spoon-feed your audience too much, they become lazy, less interested, and less receptive to your ideas. Playwrights often forget one of the actors in the drama—the audience. The audience has goals too: to understand, to comprehend, to make sense of what is happening onstage. There is a direct dynamic with the audience, and a dynamic requires points of tension, push and pull—like isometrics. This muscular dynamic requires work. And an audience likes to work in the theater. They like to try to figure out things; they look for clues (“Match wits with Inspector Hamlet!”). They'll listen to characters expound directly, and by extension they will listen directly to the playwright. But if the audience senses, even unconsciously, that it isn't doing any work, that there isn't an active role for them to play in their relationship with the play and its ideas, then an audience doesn't really know why it was invited to the show in the first place. Underline the word “unconsciously” here. I don't think audiences are very cognizant of this dynamic or their need to work in the theater. But the dynamic exists, and the playwright who ignores it throws her ideas out into the wind.

Sometimes characters debate ideas, as they do in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, but there are always personal dramatic stakes. The outcome of a debate on war and munitions-making may affect a marriage, as in Shaw's Major Barbara. When the idea is worked into the fabric of the dramatic action, when the stakes involved are human stakes, then the ideas are not simply bumper stickers tossed from the stage. The ideas are blood and flesh and fire and oxygen, the fuel of characters who are in the process of making discoveries about the world, their fellow creatures and themselves as a result of their thinking and their acts. In these instances, debates are human actions.

Meaning is best articulated in the minds of the audience who have witnessed the events and reached their own conclusions. It is this joined activity that the playwright and the audience embark on that makes the journey and the discovery worthwhile. Theater is often referred to as a collaborative art. And in this question of ideas, as in many others, the playwright should remember that her most important collaborator is her audience.

EXERCISES

1. What ideas are important to you as a playwright, as an artist, as a human being? Make a list of some of these ideas.

2. Do any of these ideas connect to any of the dramatic actions you developed in the previous exercises? If so, write down the action that would display one of these ideas. If not, find an action that does. Write that down.

3. Look at the actions you developed in the previous exercises. The actions tell you something about your characters. But what do the actions tell you about the world in which the characters live? Do the actions you choose say anything about life, love, mortality, youth, politics, race, or a thousand other subjects? If not, consider other potential actions that might engender these kinds of ideas. Write the various actions and ideas on paper. How many different actions can depict the same idea? How many different ideas are inherent in a single action?

4. Now turn one of your ideas into a short scene. Use two characters, your protagonist and your antagonist. Put them in conflict. Make them do battle over something tangible (an object, a decision, a concrete goal). Dramatize the idea (war is bad, charity is good, suicide is defensible) without ever mentioning the idea in words. Let the actions speak for themselves.

LANGUAGE

Language refers to what is spoken onstage by the actors in a play. Most of a play's action and meaning is articulated through language, what a character says, how a character speaks. Aristotle wrote about language as “tone, imagery, and cadence (sound).” He argued that its power lies in its many incarnations onstage—as verse, metaphor, strophe, antistrophe, jest, rhyme and epigram.

The language of a play is often discussed as if it were separate from character, plot and ideas—as if the audience could understand character, plot and ideas without a play's language. With very few exceptions, every action depicted in a play is depicted through language. One could even say that, in drama, language is action. Even stage actions that ostensibly take place without dialogue—a kiss, a duel—either follow language that refers to the action or precedes language that results from the action.

When an audience member leaves a successful play like Hamlet and is asked about what she recalls of the play, she will most likely note two things: memorable events and actions—“when all those Danish people got killed at the end”; memorable dialogue—“To be or not to be.”

Good dialogue tells the audience what it needs to know—the time period, background, setting and style of a play—but above all, good dialogue creates an event, changes the dynamic of the plot, and alters the characters' lives. It is action-oriented. It has a subject and a predicate, and it emphasizes the verb. An active verb is dramatic. Good dialogue is language doing. Good dialogue is both expressive and economical. In most plays, it must shift tenses constantly:

• It must deliver exposition (what has happened).

• It must depict action (what is happening).

• It must promise future action (what may happen).

Present tense action-dialogue is informed by the past and in turn informs the future, all the while seeming natural to the character's speech, psychology and education. The following quote from Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes is a fine example of this past/present/future kind of dialogue:

REGINA: I'm smiling, Ben. I'm smiling because you are quite safe while Horace lives. But I don't think Horace will live. And if he doesn't I shall want 75% in exchange for the bonds. And if I don't get what I want I am going to put all three of you in jail.

A well-drawn character with language specific to that character will never sound like another character. Diction, grammar, word choice and syntax are all clues to character. Good dialogue identifies the character of its speaker. Even without their characters' names printed on the page we would recognize a key line of dialogue spoken by Richard III or by Blanche DuBois from Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire or by Ricky Roma from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Which of them said, “Now is the winter of our discontent”? Which said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”? Which said, “All train compartments smell vaguely of shit”?

Have you ever done this? You're reading a play. The dialogue sounds less like the writer has listened to his characters than assigned lines to them. The names are not memorable, so you find that you keep paging to the front to check the character list to try to keep them sorted in your mind. If the play has a list of the original actors, maybe you start trying to hear their voices to help make the distinction. Still you can't figure out who's saying what. But, you argue, onstage that won't be a problem. We'll see and hear the dialogue coming out of the actors' mouths. True. But neutral-sounding dialogue—generic dialogue—has a flattening effect on an audience. When all the characters sound alike, a dullness sets in. Dialogue must not only move action, it must define character.

EXERCISES

1. Return to the situation you established in the earlier exercises. Maybe you've already thought about some of the things the characters might say to get what they want. Maybe not. After all, if a character's goal is to steal a bag of money, pulling a gun and grabbing the cash might be the quickest, most effective means. But write a scene that doesn't depend on physical action or props. Put two characters in conflict over an object—a jewel, a diary, a letter, a photo, whatever. What can each character say to the other to get the object? Be clever. Be imaginative. What could your protagonist say to get what he or she wants?

2. Look at your dialogue. Did you use active verbs (“Give me that letter or I'll strangle you”)? Or did you rely primarily on descriptive passages emphasizing nouns and adjectives (“That letter reminds me of a long-lost love, like a memory of a delicate flower”)? As we discussed in this section, active verbs are what drive the best dialogue. Look at great lines and passages from famous plays. Find the verbs within the sentences. You'll be amazed at the number of active verbs writers use and how the verbs provoke actions and reactions on the part of other characters. If your own dialogue seems to lack active verbs, rewrite your scene to include them as much as possible.

3. Write a one-page scene of dialogue in which every exchange regarding the conflict contains a verb. (Example: “I want you to give me that letter.” “Only if you leave this room.” “Not unless you turn your back first.”)

MUSIC

When Aristotle wrote his Poetics, music was an integral part of the classical Greek theater. The dialogue of the time was not spoken but rather sung. Music has always played a major part in the theater—as song, as music for dance, in opera, in musicals and as incidental music. Remember when we defined theater, in part, as the sensory appreciation of live performance? Music has great power in our lives. We respond to music in physical, emotional and intellectual ways. Music feeds the human spirit, and the smart playwright includes music to the sensory experience of his play. Many of Shakespeare's plays contain songs. Hamlet includes the eerie song Ophelia sings before her death. Othello has Iago's devilish drinking song.

Vaudeville, burlesque, melodrama (literally “melody” and “drama” folded together) kept music a part of the theater well into the early twentieth century. The piano player situated in his pit or off to the side of the rehearsal hall is a staple theatrical image. The great musicals of the Broadway stage started early in the century with George M. Cohan. But it was with the landmark 1926 production of Jerome Kern's and Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat that the modern American musical was born. Show Boat was the first “book-musical”—a musical that alternated between songs, dance numbers and a written, dialogue-driven plot. The genius of Show Boat, however, was that its music and lyrics also moved the story. Songs like “Can't Help Loving That Man of Mine” and “Old Man River” were not only beautiful melodies with moving lyrics that depicted the lives of the characters, they also constituted actions that moved the story. Oscar Hammerstein's work on Show Boat revolutionized the American musical theater.

Music still plays a large part in the contemporary theater, and not just within the traditional “musical.” Many playwrights explicitly include music in their “nonmusical” plays—the haunting melody Arthur Miller required for Death of a Salesman comes to mind, as do the incidental score Richard Peaselee composed for the Peter Brook production of Marat/Sade and Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo.

There are many dramatic ways to represent music onstage:

• Hedda's last trill at the piano, the trill that so annoys her husband George and her rival Mrs. Elvstead, before she shoots herself at the end of Hedda Gabler.

• The eerie whistling of the killer in Emlyn Williams' thriller Night Must Fall.

• The “ta-rum-ta-rum” Masha and Vershinin hum to each other as a kind of lover's code in Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters.

• The pulsating, scatological chant that punctuates the end of the first act of Caryl Churchill's satire about greedy financiers, Serious Money.

Unfortunately, as we move deeper into the twentieth century it's fair to note that most plays do not include music. Nonetheless, Aristotle's fifth element shouldn't be dropped from the list. In fact, we can stretch the definition of music. We can stretch it to include sound.

Language is about the words. But the sound of those words can be musical. A line from Othello (“She loved me for the battles I had fought, and I loved her that she did pity them.”) sounds beautiful to the ear—its cadence, its combination of vowels and consonants, its balance—devoid of its intellectual and emotional meaning. The active sound of typewriters in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's newspaper comedy The Front Page or the clamp of horses' hooves in Equus or the sinister tap of a golf putter on a frightened man's glasses in Sam Shepard's True West all have a musical sense. Strategically placed sound can have tremendous theatrical effect.

One of my most memorable theatrical experiences took place at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1979. In Barbara Field's adaptation of nineteenth-century Russian playwright Nikolai Gogol's satire of love and courtship Marriage, a bachelor played by Peter Michael Goetz had a habit of petulantly kicking a wall. His kicks had an odd rhythm. At the end of the play, his fiancée is waiting for him at the wedding banquet. The audience knows the bachelor has run off. What we hear on the sound system is the rapid clip of his horses' hooves as they gallop away. The rhythm of the hooves is the same as his odd kicks heard earlier in the play. The Guthrie's sound system was sensurround—in-the-round—and the audience heard the hooves gallop around them, as if the horses were circling the house, torturing the weeping bride. And at the end of the play, in a marvelous coup de theatre, all the champagne corks on the wedding banquet table popped off together, at once, on cue.

One more example: Silence can be musical.

Look at the plays of Harold Pinter and study his precise arrangement of pauses and silences. The impact of what is not heard—like an expected action that does not take place—is often as theatrical and dramatic as what is.

In the theater, as in life, audiences need music. Imagine our lives without it. A baby falls asleep to a lullaby. A teenager cries along with a love song. An old man hums a tune from a half-remembered symphony. A percussive rhythm makes a woman leap to her feet and dance.

Music is a vital part of the human experience, just as it remains a key ingredient of Aristotle's six elements. And the playwright who ignores the impact music provides in terms of vitality, melody, mood, and elucidation of character and action ignores what is often the very spirit and soul of a theatrical/dramatic experience.

EXERCISES

1. Go back to your dramatic situation. What opportunities for music are afforded you by this situation? Could either of your characters sing? Or play an onstage instrument? Is there a band nearby? An orchestra? A radio? Could someone whistle or tap out a rhythm on a table?

2. If you could include music in your scene, what function would it perform? Would it tell us about the time period or setting? Would it create mood? Would it be an action? How might you use a song to perform an action? Maybe it's a love-affair code like the one Chekhov used in The Three Sisters. Maybe it has an emotional effect, like “As Time Goes By” does in Casablanca. Maybe it's used as an irritant, something to provoke another character. Write a scene involving conflict. Write in a cue for music. Make it depict the setting or time period. (Example: “We hear the sound of a radio broadcast of 1930s dance music.”) Now write a scene where an onstage instrument is played for dramatic effect. Now write a scene where a character sings all or part of a song to provoke an action on the part of a second character.

3. What sounds lend themselves to your scene? Think of the setting. Think of props. Almost any object can have a dramatic sound if placed within the proper context. How can sounds be used by a character to achieve goals? Write a scene that utilizes everyday items (shoes, pencils, bottles, buckets of water, etc.) that can have an aural impact. How could a character use the sounds these objects make to provoke another character?

SPECTACLE

In Aristotle's time, spectacle referred to what was seen onstage, and what was seen onstage in fifth century B.C. Greece was often spectacular—lead players wearing masks and robes, the sweep of the Chorus. Big stuff. But it's easy to confuse the concept of spectacle with that of bigness. Let me define spectacle this way: It's whatever looks neat onstage. Some examples:

• The Greek Chorus majestically entering the stage in Oedipus.

• The swordfight at the end of Hamlet.

• The intricate, moving, mechanical stage designs that Inigo Jones created for playwright Ben Jonson's seventeenth-century Stuart court plays, or “masques.”

• The first time “real” furniture appeared onstage in Restoration comedy when a playwright attempted to make eighteenth-century London audiences identify with the social and material aspirations of his characters; a love seat in Richard Sheridan's comedy of manners The School for Scandal may have had the same spectacular visual impact in the 1700s that the famous helicopter does in the today's musical Miss Saigon.

• A dance number from the musical Guys and Dolls.

• A puppet show.

• A box that transforms itself into many things in the course of a play (see Shel Silverstein's comedy The Box).

• A single match lit in the darkness in Bill Corbett's nightmarish political satire Motorcade.

Remember the sensory definition of theater. Spectacle makes the audience say “Wow.” A big wow or a small one—it's all context. Miss Saigon is a big musical filled with big visual moments—marches, dances, onstage cars, etc. Miss Saigon needs something as big as its famous helicopter to make an impression. Because the show has challenged itself and upped-the-ante, its spectacle impact demands a grander scale. It's the same with the falling chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera.

On a bare stage, spectacle takes on a different meaning on a different scale. Trevor Nunn's famous eight-hour version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, adapted by David Edgar from Charles Dickens' novel, utilized every theatrical trick in the book. Actors “played” animals, children and soldiers. Actors “played” a stagecoach. Actors “played” a wall. That's spectacle.

Sometimes spectacle is achieved by a small gesture. In the premier production of Bill Corbett's Motorcade, two actors portrayed dozens of characters in a small midwestern town. The sight of two gifted impersonators changing character before our very eyes—by just a shift in body-language, an alteration of expression, a lowering of voice and flick of rhythm—was spectacle enough. But at one point, the lights lowered to darkness and one of the actors, Corbett himself, struck a match. The effect—the scrape of the match, the spark, the flash of blue, then the tiny ball of yellow and red as the pinpoint of fire illuminated Corbett's devilish transformation into one of his more diabolical characters—was stunning. Aural. Visual. Dramatic. Spectacle.

Props such as the match are often useful in creating stage spectacle. Guns, swords, pens, flags, letters—all have a power onstage. Sometimes a prop has a dramatic purpose as well as a theatrical/spectacle purpose. The latchkey that is used in Frederick Knott's Dial “M” for Murder is dramatic because its use by Tony Wendice in the play's final moments proves Tony's guilt. Tony had earlier lent the key to the hired murderer. And it's theatrical because we hear the key enter the lock, and then see Tony enter the flat, key in hand. In Elizabeth Egloff's romantic drama The Swan, a woman and a man toss a full beer bottle back and forth a number times, but they don't spill a drop. The spectacle comes from our knowledge that this is happening live, and that the actors could drop the bottle. It's not a movie; there aren't any retakes. The “live” aspect of such an action lends the bottle toss its spectacular quality.

Spectacle can be about the human form and the physical/spatial relationship onstage between human beings. Remember: Always show instead of tell. What will an audience think if a man says he hates the woman he is arguing with and then grabs her hand and kisses her? The physical action will counteract the verbal expression. Physical gesture in theater can be as grand as a wave of actors doing battle onstage in Shakespeare's Henry V, and it can be as small as a woman reaching out a hand towards her husband in J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls. In the right dramatic and theatrical contexts, both gestures are huge. That wave of soldiers and their patterns of battle will determine the fate of nations and the futures of many characters we've grown to care about in Shakespeare's play. That woman has been depicted in An Inspector Calls as an icy, imperious grande dame; when she is forced to reach out for her husband, we see in her gesture the desperation, the fear, and the tender need beneath her armor. Spectacular.

Because spectacle is primarily a visual element—framed action, as it were—it's important that you study visual depictions of dramatic scenes. Look at models and drawings of famous theater designs. Look at photographs of nineteenth and twentieth century stage productions. Look at paintings that render dramatic characters, settings and actions: religious paintings, family portraits, representations of historical events—battles, executions, picnics, marriage proposals, surrenders and last rites. Spectacle is vital to an audience's senses, as sight is to a person's comprehension and enjoyment of the world. It is seeing, and spectacle is most firmly connected to the concept of the theater as a place for seeing.

EXERCISES

1. Imagine the stage picture you've created for your confrontation scene, the one between your protagonist and antagonist. What possibilities exist for spectacle? Could there be a violent disruption of the stage picture? Could something explode onstage, be destroyed onstage, come through a wall, turn the set upside down? Could something be constructed onstage? Could there be a dance? An embrace? A fight? Write the scene with this in mind.

2. Think in terms of props again. What do they lend themselves to? Imagine a waving American flag, or a spinning full-length mirror, or a book catching fire. Write your scene with one prop used as an instrument of dramatic spectacle.

3. Think in terms of the body. What can the body do by itself—without props—that has visual force and meaning onstage? Can the body transform itself into another person or object? Can it be shaped onstage, like a sculpture? What actions can be depicted by the body? What meaning can be derived from the actions? A crippled girl “dances” in Peter Nichols' Joe Egg. Actors pretend to be horses in Equus. A crazy minister gets on the floor and acts like bacon frying in Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo. Write your scene with the transformative nature of the human body in mind; make the body do something spectacular.

PUTTING ARISTOTLE TOGETHER

The great plays of Western drama employ all six of Aristotle's elements. There is a constant handoff of elements, often many working together at a single moment. I'd like to detail one famous example of a dramatic scene that employs all six elements at the same time to great dramatic effect. It is at the end of A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen's famous 1879 play about Nora, the “little bird” of a housewife whose involvement in a blackmail plot finally results in a discovery of her own power and possibilities, which in turn causes her to leave her husband, Helmer. Here are the last lines and stage directions of A Doll's House.

HELMER: This is the end then! Nora, will you never think of me any more?

NORA: Yes, of course. I shall often think of you and the children and this house.

HELMER: May I write to you, Nora?

NORA: No. Never. You mustn't do that.

HELMER: But at least you must let me send you—

NORA: Nothing. Nothing.

HELMER: But if you should need help—?

NORA: I tell you, no. I don't accept things from strangers.

HELMER: Nora—can I never be anything but a stranger to you?

NORA: (Picks up her bag) Oh, Torvald! Then the miracle of miracles would have to happen.

HELMER: The miracle of miracles?

NORA: You and I would both have to change so much that—oh, Torvald, I don't believe in miracles any longer.

HELMER: But I want to believe in them. Tell me. We should have to change so much that—?

NORA: That life together between us two could become a marriage. Goodbye. (NORA exits)

HELMER: Nora! Nora! Empty! She's gone! (A hope strikes him) The miracle of miracles—?

    (The street door is shut downstairs.)

    Curtain

Did you find the six elements? Let's take them one by one:

Character—The moment defines Nora. Her decision to leave Torvald—a shocking moment in both the history of drama and the history of gender politics—is a turning point for her character, the culmination of all her previous history and actions, and a launching pad for the person she will be for the rest of her life.

Action—Nora's departure is the key action of the play. Nora's act changes not only her own life, but the lives of her family. It is the result of all of the play's previous actions, and no other acts on the part of any of the characters will ever be the same because of it.

Ideas—Shocking then and still startling today, Nora's exit is a philosophical rallying point for a discussion of the role of women in modern society. What is a wife? What is a family? What duties and responsibilities do husbands and wives have to each other? And does the act of one woman—the act of one Nora leaving her Torvald—have a societal impact greater than her simple exit would suggest? Does it create repercussions in the audience? No idea engendered by any of Ibsen's other writings was ever as impressively wrought, discussed, debated and dramatized as Nora's exit.

Language—Ibsen was never known for his flights of rhetoric. In terms of language, he was probably the least indulgent of the great playwrights of the last one hundred years. His characters say what they need to say, no more, no less. Sometimes the power of language lies in its dramatic simplicity. “Goodbye” is a simple word. We say it every day, dozens of times, to friends, family, associates, acquaintances and strangers. But it is in context that “goodbye” has such power. In the context of this scene, “goodbye” has a finality that seals the end of Nora and Torvald's life together. A relationship changes, a marriage ends, a world is revolutionized in Nora's simple “Goodbye.”

Music—There is no actual music in A Doll's House, but in it we do find one of drama's most indelible sounds: the sound of the door closing. Like the word “goodbye” the sound of that door shutting behind Nora imparts a finality to the scene, to the play and to the characters. The thud of wood, the cold snap of a deadbolt is the final beat of a heart. The sound of that door closing—its weight, its wood and steel—tells us a lot about Nora's will, her strength, and the kind of world she's rejecting.

Spectacle—Here, too, we return to the image of departure. Look at the onstage picture Ibsen has drawn. We see a comfortable, middle-class home complete with a Christmas tree. Everything about the image suggests safe domesticity. And then the wife leaves. It is a powerful image of departure. How many times have you seen someone you love walk away from you, perhaps never to come back? How many times did your heart break at the leaving? A hole exists where there was once a person, movement, color. The person has gone, and the picture is changed forever. Onstage entrances and exits have great power. An entrance begins an action, introduces a story, ushers in a character who may change the onstage world as we know it. A stage exit can suggest a person moving away to accomplish a great offstage task. It can also suggest a person being taken away in shame as the result of actions that have taken place before our eyes. The last image of A Doll's House is a visual summing up of all the previous dramatic actions and previous visual images that have come before it.

Ibsen could have dispatched Nora from the stage in any number of ways. She could have left Torvald a letter. She could have decided to leave but stayed one more night. She could have avoided the word “goodbye.” She could have slipped out a window, leaving behind no sound at all. Each of these options would have been plausible. But they weren't as interesting. They weren't as dramatic. They weren't as theatrical. By combining all six elements at this crucial climactic moment of his play, Ibsen assured his audience a maximum experience, maximum impact. He assured his audience a conclusion they would never forget.

The ending of A Doll's House reminds us of the power of Aristotle's six elements when woven together at the conclusion of a play in a memorable and satisfying whole. One does not want to be too prescriptive, but it's amazing how powerful a dramatic, theatrical moment becomes when the elements are all working together in an organic movement.

Read the plays you love, plays that have the power to excite the senses and engage the mind. And track the ways the playwrights have woven the six elements into the drama, into the theater. Chances are you'll be amazed by how many of them are actively in play at every moment.

EXERCISES

1. Look over your previous exercises. Sift through the various character-driven actions, images, sounds and ideas you've sketched. Some of what you've come up with for a few of the exercises may fit with other parts of the exercises. More won't. Go back to square one. Look at your two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist. Are they the people you want them to be? Are they interesting? Do they have strong needs? What about that goal for the protagonist? Is it the right one? Look at your setting, your dialogue, the sounds and images you selected. Think about it all very carefully.

2. Now. Start again. Create a short scene that employs all six of Aristotle's elements, in much the same way that Ibsen does for A Doll's House. You don't have to follow his method, point by point. Be imaginative. Your scene can take place in a middle-class living room or on the dark side of the moon. Your characters can be a husband and wife or two talking hot dogs. Whoever they are, create a dramatic situation. Create vibrant characters with goals; put them in conflict; energize their language through action verbs; find visual and aural complements; engender ideas through the action. It may take a few false starts and run to a few pages, but work through the exercise until you've got it. It's exciting to activate all the theatrical elements at your disposal when writing drama.