Can you picture that? Using visual media to inspire playwrights

Abstract

In the United States, the culture of new play development has led to placing primary importance on the spoken dialogue rather than the larger world of story. Because many writers do begin in early dramatic writing classes, it is important for playwriting instructors to recognise that they themselves are dramaturgs operating in a workshop environment. This research asked instructors to consider using exercises (which we may also think of as writing prompts) that challenge writers to engage with other media as a means writing for performances in three-dimensional spaces: Todd Ristau at Hollins University has an exercise in which he asks his students to build small, imagined versions of the sets for their plays using found materials. James Ryan, formerly of The New School, asks students to use photographs of persons and antiques to create monologues and scenes. In my advanced dramatic writing class, students take pictures using their friends (or action figures, Legos, etc.) to stand in for their characters and world of story during key moments of their plays. The article argues that these approaches will help playwrights move away from dialogue as an end-goal by encouraging writers to focus on the mise en scène.

Keywords:

• new play development
• new play dramaturgy
• playwriting
• mise en scene

Notes

² The conversations were held informally via Facebook threads, which in turn resulted in my writing an editorial that appears in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of The Dramatists: The Journal of the Dramatists Guild of America.

³ Laurren Iaocobellis’ thesis (2012) views new play dramaturgy in established Canadian theatres via the lens of material semiotics (see Knowles 2004, p. 3). Knowles’ approach to theatre criticism will be discussed further in exercise three.

⁴ ‘Postdramatic theatre’ is a term offered by Hans-Thies Lehmann who suggests that there are a number of similarities between performance art directors and innovators from the 1960s to the present who create different styles of theatre which decenter the primacy of the text; rather, the experience tends to be more an aesthetic address to, or conversation with, an audience. Stated simply, with postdramatic theatre there is no plot (see Lehmann 2006).

⁵ The larger discussion in Gruber’s work has to do with the ways in which writers create space via dialogue, which is somewhat in conversation with this present study, though admittedly for much different purposes. Gruber’s focus is on spectacle in the imagination of the audience as a result of dialogue, while I am asking writers to embrace notions of spectacle (scenic elements and movement) as a starting point. In the section cited, Gruber is contrasting Beckett’s use of space with that of Gertrude Stein, whose plays were plays in name only, as they were meant to be performed; however, they lacked the plot, character description, and stage directions that would indicate to a reader that they were indeed dramas (see Gruber 2010, pp. 117‒123).

⁶ See also my textbook Inciting Incidents: Creating Your Own Theatre from Page to Performance (Bray 2015b, pp. 21-27) for more details regarding this exercise.