CHAPTER THREE

Space, Time and Causality

In college, my theater professor Elliot Stout gave me a bit of advice I'll always remember. “If anyone ever comes up to you at a cocktail party and says, ‘What is reality?’ just reply, ‘Reality? Why, space, time and causality.’ ”

This was German philosopher Immanuel Kant's eighteenth-century definition of reality. While Kant's definition is only one way of looking at reality, his space/time/causality model works extremely well for drama and theater. What's most useful is that for each of the three parts of Kant's definition there is a double meaning. The word means one thing within the play and in the reality being depicted; it means something else in regards to the theatrical depiction of that reality onstage.

SPACE

Within the reality of the play, “space” refers to the rooms, landscapes and settings of the play's action. The castle battlements of Hamlet's Elsinore, the drawing room of the Tesman household in Hedda Gabler, the desert wilderness of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In terms of the performance, “space” refers to the actual stage where the actors perform.

Obviously, these are not the same. The stage is always representing the play's reality. Sometimes the stage is designed to appear just as the room or the desert or the battlement would. The director and the designer provide a realistic depiction of the setting that, save the absence of the “fourth wall” where the audience sits, looks just like the real thing. This realistic approach reached its zenith at the end of the nineteenth century. Castles, gardens, racetracks, ships, forests, factories all were realistically depicted at great cost and with great impact. To this day, most productions keep more than a foot in this realistic world. Within the last thirty years, apartment living rooms, kitchens, writers' studies, offices, even mountains have been successfully rendered onstage in full realistic mode. An audience is thrilled when they see a set that so painstakingly represents a reality they know (the middle-class kitchen in Willy Russell's Shirley Valentine) or have never even dreamed about (the munitions factory of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara).

By contrast, in a nonrealistic mode, reality can still be depicted in numerous ways. Here we must acknowledge the contract signed between the audience and the theater. It is the “suspension of disbelief” that audiences allow when watching a play. The audience allows that there is no fourth wall. The audience allows that events that usually take many hours, days, weeks, months or years (dinners, meetings, trials, investigations, wars) will be depicted onstage in stage time that will amount to no more than two or three hours. The audience allows that the visual elements that depict a scene can be rendered as powerfully by one or two suggestive scenic elements as by full realistic depictions. An English sitting room could be rendered by a full realistic set, or it could be rendered by one Queen Anne sofa. An office might be rendered by a full realistic set, or it could be rendered by a desk and chair. A garden could be rendered by a full realistic set, or it could be rendered with a single trellis. In the suspension of disbelief an audience member says to herself, “If they say it's a garden, I'll believe it's a garden, even if I can see that it's just a trellis on an empty stage.” The audience is willing to play along. It's part of the fun.

This kind of scenic shorthand is so common today and so effective that sometimes the suggestive scenic element is not even an onstage set or prop. Sometimes it's just a word. In Shakespeare, we find numerous courts, throne rooms, battlements, beaches and blasted heaths. Seldom is there a mention of a particular piece of furniture unless it's vital to the action (Desdemona's bed, or the arras behind which Polonius hides). Shakespeare was very crafty about these things. The setting notations in the script are never more than “A Room in the Castle.” What often defines these rooms is the language, the dialogue. If the king and queen are holding court and the dialogue suggests a royal setting, it stands to reason that we are in the court. The audience doesn't need the thrones, the banners, the trappings.

As a playwright, ask yourself this question: How might you depict a realistic setting for one of your plays? How about a hospital nurses' station? First ask yourself what is dramatically essential. What furniture or props do your characters really need? Only when you have determined what you need onstage for your characters to act and move the plot forward can you decide how to represent it.

But, you argue, isn't that the job of the designer or director? True, some directors and designers can solve problems of set and staging, but you want to write plays that are stageworthy, and the more you can do in the writing to suggest solutions and create ideas, the better.

The nurses' station. How to depict it:

Realistically: A full set with all the walls, doors and hospital gadgets

One or two suggestive scenic elements: A swivel chair and desk

One scenic element: A counter with a sign on it that reads “Nurses' Station”

One hand prop: A hospital clipboard

By costume only: An actor in a nurse's uniform

By dialogue only: MAN: “Excuse me, ma'am, is this the sixth-floor nurses' station?”

See how quickly you can reduce the necessities?

In today's theater, realistically reproduced settings are found primarily in one-set plays, like Felix and Oscar's living room in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple and Jessie's kitchen in Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother. More and more, stage design—especially when dealing with multiple settings—requires a nonrealistic approach. Part of the move toward nonrealistic depictions comes from the expense involved in designing and building huge realistic sets, and the playwright who ignores the financial realities of producing a play today is blindsided by his own ignorance. It is important to remember that realistic depictions of reality were primarily a nineteenth-century addition to the theater, an addition that has dominated much of the twentieth-century theater we know and love. Prior to the nineteenth-century, stage designers and playwrights were much less concerned about making things onstage appear real. Eighteenth-century Restoration comedies took place in front of flat drawings of rooms and outdoor settings. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century staging of plays by Shakespeare and Moliere often took place out of doors on wooden planks, with only the occasional table or chair brought in when necessary. And no Greek dramatist ever spent any time worrying about what Oedipus' taste in throne room furnishings was like. A Greek drama took place on a stage that would remind us more of a Gospel concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Realism is relatively new to the theater. And those playwrights who require realistic sets today stick to one or two. The rule of thumb: If the action requires a set, make the set realistic. If the action doesn't, allow for a lot less. Examples of necessary set pieces would include the office door behind which the real estate salesmen are taken to be interrogated in Glengarry Glen Ross, the locked room where the woman is held captive in Jane Martin's abortion-rights drama Keely and Du, and Oscar Madison's kitchen wall in The Odd Couple. Why is that wall necessary? Because Oscar throws a plate of linguini at it. No wall, no crash.

Space onstage can be theatricalized as well with two or more scenes taking place at once. A play like Craig Lucas' haunting comedy Blue Window, which concerns a group of alienated New Yorkers, operates on multiple spatial levels at one time: two or more scenes taking place onstage at the same time but representing actions that take place in different locales. This technique is most commonly seen in musicals. One thinks of the first-act ending of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, in which all the characters sing about the “weekend in the country” they're about to embark on. The characters are understood to be in their separate homes as they read their invitations, but the audience sees them downstage at the footlights together. It is a stage convention. It is also delightful in its theatricality.

One of my favorite memories from my early theater-going was seeing a production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park by the Steubenville Players in my hometown. If you know the play, you'll remember that in the first act the young married couple has just moved into their Greenwich Village fifth floor walk-up apartment. The apartment is a disaster, but the young wife sees it as a challenge. The first act ends. The audience takes its intermission. When they return to their seats and the lights come up, there is a gasp in the audience, followed by applause. The formerly shabby apartment has been transformed into a beautifully decorated home.

Why does the audience applaud? Two reasons: (1) They are applauding the character of the wife, her imagination, talent and hard work. (2) They are applauding the set changeover planned by the designer and carried out by the crew during the intermission. They are applauding what took place behind the curtain. They love the idea that while they were at the intermission bar, all this activity, this transformation, was taking place. They know it's supposed to represent the efforts of many weeks, but they also know the truth: that it was all a matter of careful planning and stage tricks—panels that revolve, carpets that fit easily into place, fixtures that snap into the set's fake walls. They are applauding the reality depicted and the stage conventions used to depict it. It delights them. And in this example of realism, it was the playwright, Neil Simon, who provided the words on the page that created this delight.

There are plays, however, that seemingly require realistic settings (offices, apartments, bedrooms), but allow for and lend themselves to great flexibility in the design. Tony Kushner's award-winning Angels in America requires over a dozen sets as varied as Roy Cohn's townhouse, Washington restaurants, a Brooklyn apartment, a federal courthouse men's room, a Salt Lake City backyard, a deserted Bronx street corner, a hospital room, Central Park and the North Pole. On Broadway, with a huge budget, these settings were rendered as realistically as possible. In fact, the Broadway production actually included an iceberg for the North Pole scene. But a close look at the script shows that it is not necessary to be quite so realistic. With the exception of Roy Cohn's desk with its complex phone system, most of the scenes can be staged without any pieces of furnishing—yes, even the North Pole. More often than not, Kushner's dialogue furnishes the setting.

So, in this question of space, the key points to remember are these:

• Require only those scenic elements that are absolutely necessary.

• Know that audiences love the completeness of a realistic set.

• Know they also love the nonrealistic theatricality of “let's pretend.”

• Multiple realistic sets are almost prohibitive in the contemporary theater.

• Economics often require a scenic imagination that is liberating to the writer.

• Never say, “Let the design people worry about that.”

TIME

Within the reality of the play, “time” refers to the time it takes to perform the realistic action depicted in a realistic manner. A war in Macbeth or Shaw's Saint Joan might take place over months or years. A trial, such as those in Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution or Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men, takes at least weeks to complete. A late-night party such as the one depicted in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? takes four, five or six hours. In terms of the performance, “time” refers to the number of minutes it takes to watch the performance—the playing time.

These are not necessarily the same amounts of time. While there are some plays we call Time = Time plays, in which the time it takes to perform the realistic action (real time) is exactly the same as the time it takes to watch the performance (playing time), most plays are not written this way. Even Greek classical tragedy—which obeyed Aristotle's “unities” of time, place and action—“compressed” time.

Let's look at the unities for a moment.

• Unity of place—all the events take place in a single setting.

• Unity of action—there is one central action in the play.

• Unity of time—all the events take place in a single twenty-four-hour time period.

Even in this ancient scheme, there was room for theatricalization. True, there may be one action in Oedipus (the hero's attempt to end the plague of Thebes), and true, the action takes place in a single setting (the royal court); nonetheless, the events of that twenty-four-hour period take far less than twenty-four hours to perform. These events and this time period were compressed into just a few hours of stage time.

Very few contemporary dramatists write Time = Time plays, but we would all be well advised to try our hand at one. It's a demanding form that tests many different kinds of dramatic muscles. Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother comes immediately to mind. The play is a two-character one-act, performed without intermission, which makes sense in a Time = Time play, given that real time has no intermissions. But even here we have to acknowledge Norman's compression of time. Events that would take place over many hours in real life somehow take place in the neat confines of ninety minutes when depicted in her play. This, as Alfred Hitchcock once defined drama, is “life with the dull bits cut out.” The trick is to make an event seem as if it could take place in less time than it really does.

In Anton Chekhov's Russian comedy about writers, actors and lovers, The Sea Gull, an offstage dinner party is begun and completed within about seven minutes. In Maxwell Anderson's thriller about a homicidal little girl, The Bad Seed, a three-minute cocktail hour is made to seem longer by the refrain of “Freshen that drink?” In David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a policeman is ostensibly interrogating a group of salesmen behind a closed door, but his “thorough” interrogation of each man can't possibly last more than twelve minutes each.

It's a trick—one the audience plays along with. The audience allows for an acceleration of action as part of the suspension of disbelief. As long as the compression of time is not too accelerated—so accelerated as to appear ridiculous—the action of the play will not seem to rush by at too rapid a pace. The audience wants the playwright to cut out the dull bits. Fifty-five minutes of onstage action can seem to represent an entire dinner party (Blue Window) or a stockholders' meeting (Jon Robin Baitz's The Substance of Fire) or a political debate (David Hare's A Map of the World), all of which are events that would take hours to enact in real life. What the playwright must keep in mind, however, is that no matter how willing the audience is to suspend its disbelief, they do expect the shape of the scene to follow the shape of the real event. The cocktail party may take only minutes, but it had better follow the form of introductions, offers of drinks, refills and the like. The courtroom battle may not take months to play out as it does in real life, but the audience expects to see the opening arguments, the questioning, the cross examinations, the summations and the verdict. The stockholders' meeting may be over in moments, but the audience wants to know who owns what percentages, what is at stake, who's on whose side and they want to see the vote at the end.

A five-second pause onstage feels like an eternity. Time elongates onstage, so playwrights are always compressing action. Since Shakespeare's time, audiences have been well acquainted with the notion of a scene beginning “five months later,” or in Ibsen's day, “the next morning,” or in the comedies of the 1930s, “a few minutes later.” Audiences can make that leap and make it comfortably. And, as in scenes that take place in multiple settings on the same stage, time can be fluid onstage. A character may go back in time or forward. A character may relive a past moment in the present. Historical events may hurry by in seconds. The audience's contract with the stage allows all this and more.

The greatest danger onstage is that time may seem longer than it really is. In most cases the playwright doesn't want an audience to think they've been in the theater longer than they have. We all know what it means when someone says that a thirty-five-minute first act “seemed to go on forever.” It means not enough happened. There weren't enough actions, followed by reactions, followed in turn by new actions to hold the audience's interest. That's how time elongates. If the actions are moving forward and the suspense is properly generated, the hours pass like minutes.

So, in this question of time, the key points to remember are these:

• Require only those dynamic actions that are absolutely necessary.

• Know that audiences love the completeness of a Time = Time play.

• Know that they also love nonrealistic, fluid, theatricalized stage time.

• Audiences “agree” to the artificial compression of action and time.

• Onstage, thirty seconds of nothing is an eternity.

CAUSALITY

Causality is an entirely dramatic concept, not a theatrical one. Causality refers to why events or actions occur. But when I say “why,” I don't necessarily refer to a twentieth-century psychological concept of “why.” In this context “why” means “what actions cause other actions to take place?” It's a question of dramatic dynamics, of falling dominoes. Causality is closely related to the dramatic concepts of goals, obstacles and linkage. To more fully understand this linkage of actions, let's examine a situation established in a play and find its dynamic causal relationships. The causal relationship is directly connected to the idea of goals, obstacles and actions.

In The Changeling, a seventeenth-century Jacobean revenge tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, we meet Beatrice, engaged to Alonzo but in love with his younger brother Tomazo.

Goal: Tomazo and Beatrice are in love with each other and wish to marry.

Obstacle: Beatrice is betrothed to Tomazo's brother, Alonzo.

Solution action: Beatrice and Tomazo plot to kill Alonzo.

Further obstacle: Neither can perform the murder without courting suspicion.

Solution action: They hire DeFlores, Beatrice's servant, to kill the brother.

Further obstacle: DeFlores will only commit the murder if Beatrice allows him to have intercourse with her after the murder.

Solution action: Beatrice acquiesces to DeFlores' wish.

Action: DeFlores murders Alonzo.

Payoff: Beatrice allows DeFlores to make love to her.

Complication: After having sex with DeFlores, Beatrice falls in love with him.

… and then the play gets really interesting.

Can you track the causal effects, the falling dominoes? Experiment with causality. Track the plot of Hamlet and change an action performed by Hamlet, by Gertrude, by Polonius, by Claudius. Change one of their actions and the play changes. It no longer runs on toward the famous climax we all remember. See how unsatisfying those alternate actions and conclusions are when you change them.

Make sure the causal actions in your play link up. Nothing frustrates and infuriates an audience more than to follow a play and miss an important step. An audience can sense a playwright trying to patch together actions that were never meant to join. That's what makes them ask the question, Why did that happen?

Do yourself a favor. Be like the child who constantly tugs at his parent's hand asking over and over again, “Why?”

So, in this question of causality, the key points to remember are these:

• Require only those dynamic actions that are absolutely necessary (just as you did with “time”); skip the unimportant actions.

• Remember that audiences hate it when playwrights skip essential causal steps.

• Always make your actions link.

• Track your actions from the beginning of the play to its end, and vice versa.

• Focus the linkage of events on the constant exchange of your character's goals, obstacles and actions. Of every action ask the question, Why?

And always pull out Immanuel Kant at a cocktail party.

EXERCISES

1. Select an event that either happened to you or that you caused to happen. Make it an event you know well, one that contains human dramatic conflict. Understand its setting: Did it take place in one space or many spaces? Understand its time frame: Did it take place in one continuous length of time, or did it take many hours, days or more? What caused the event to come about? What action did you perform? What happened after? Write down the key factors in the event.

2. Now imagine the scene onstage. What do you need to show the event? Start with space. What is the fully realistic version of the set? What is the suggestive version? What is the version that needs only dialogue to depict its setting? Write down your conclusions.

3. Next, focus on time. Do you show the event in Time = Time? Or do you compress time? Will you show the event in a series of scenes? Will you go backward and forward in time? Will different depicted time frames exist onstage in the same stage time? Experiment with all the possibilities. Take a dramatic situation of conflict and write the same scene in at least three different ways: (a) Time = Time, (b) compressed time, and (c) multiple time frames.

4. Find the causal links in the action. If the central action was your decision to run away from home at the age of ten, find the links that run backward and forward from this action. Why did you run away? And what happened after you ran? Using the model from The Changeling, list the problems, solutions, actions and reactions until you have found the starting point and the concluding point of the central action.

5. “Five places in four pages.” The stage is bare. You have one to five characters at your disposal. In four pages, take your audience to five completely different locations. You may use one hand prop or rolling piece of scenery (grocery cart, toy wagon, wheelchair, etc.) per location to help suggest the scene. You get extra points if you use no props or scenery, depending entirely on dialogue.

6. “Five time periods in four pages.” The stage is still bare. You have one to five characters at your disposal. In four pages, take your audience to five completely different time periods. You may use one hand prop or costume per place to help suggest the time. Again, you get extra points if you use no props or scenery, depending entirely on dialogue.