Jose Rivera, a playwright interviewed in this book by Jeffrey Hatcher, notes that writer’s block is caused when you fail to stay true to the premise you’ve laid out in your work and/or are lying to yourself about something. When you correct the problem, you won’t be blocked anymore. I think he’s on to something because when I realized I should make a play out of my novel, Eden in Limbo, it made perfect sense. The novel is subtitled A Three-Act Play in Spirit and so it’s already structured like one.

As I read through Hatcher’s explanation of drama as a story of actions and theater as the experience of a play, I warmed to the thought of my novel/play someday being enjoyed by theatergoers, although I wondered if I had enough action as it was. When Hatcher spelled out the six elements that each successful play needs, as learned from Aristotle in his Poetics, I became increasingly excited about my project.

Here are the six elements in order of how Hatcher emphasizes them:

Character

Action (plot)

Ideas

Language

Music

spectacle (the theatricality of it)

Aristotle, writing classical Greek tragedy in the fifth century B.C., deemed action or plot the most significant part of a play. Today, though, most playwrights understand character to be most important and Hatcher shows us why in countless examples of popular older and contemporary plays such as Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrence McNally and Tennessee Williams’A Streetcar Named Desire.

I had heard of many of the plays, but didn’t know much about them and so this was a fun aspect of the book as I put myself in the role of struggling playwright. Throughout the chapters Hatcher would provoke thought about how and why plays were written the way they were, ending each chapter with exercises for us to write in conjunction with the topic. If I had done what he asked, I’d have read a dozen plays, analyzed them and outlined my own play completely!

These are the names of the chapters:

Drama and Theater; The Six Elements of Aristotle; Space, Time and Causality; Getting the Great Idea and Turning It Into a Play; Structure; Great Beginnings (with examples); Great Middles (with examples); Great Endings (with examples); Dialogue (“the art of listening to your characters”); Hedda Gabler: A Script Analysis; Three Interviews: Lee Blessing, Marsha Norman (Night, Mother!), Jose Rivera; Afterword.

I found it difficult to appreciate the plays being used as examples for great movements of a play since I was cold to the strange characters and even in the script analysis of Hedda Gabler, I couldn’t understand how her suicide at the end was a strong action as Hatcher and everyone else seems to believe. It did help me to see the progress of action to the end, though.

Recommendations

If you’re thinking about writing a play, this book will tell you all you need to know about crafting or planning it. It would be even more useful if you answered his questions at the end of the chapters, which would slow down your reading to a chapter every other day at least or longer and then you’d have a great start to your play.

It’s motivated me to write my novel as a presentational play like Shakespeare’s plays, which is the most natural method for it. It’s not a representational play where the audience is ignored by the actors, although neither type allows the writer to forget who he’s writing for besides himself. Hatcher has definitely shown me that it can be done with a lot of work, but with artfulness, too, hopefully. The Art and Craft of Playwriting should be on any aspiring playwright’s reading list.


Recommended: Yes