8 The Playwright
Ingrid De Sanctis
Unlike a novelist who writes for the page or a screenwriter who writes for film or television, playwrights write for the stage. As a student, you may first encounter a play as words on a page, but this is only the beginning of the journey. Plays are meant to live in a three-dimensional form. Because a play is a live experience with a new audience each time, it can never be repeated in exactly the same way. Playwrights are not fully satisfied until their plays move off the page and are embodied by actors on a stage in some way, shape, or form. When playwrights are writing, they understand they are in collaboration with actors, directors, and designers as they all build the play for an audience to encounter.
In this chapter, you will learn how playwrights build plays using the foundational elements of playwriting, the career of a playwright, and meet a professional playwright TJ Young, who will share his ideas about the future of playwriting in the 21st Century.
Why Playwright and not Playwrite?
The word “wright” is an old English word meaning a maker or builder. Examples include shipwrights, wheelwrights, and millwrights.
Why would the playwright be mixed in with occupations that focus on building wheels and ships and mills? Because a playwright is not just a writer of plays but a builder of plays. Playwrights are architects for the theatre and as such are equal parts visionary, anthropologist, poet, and historian. Plays are not only words on a page but a structure for future dramatic action. Plays are constructed and the playwright must understand how the writing meets the actors, meets the stage, and meets the audience. In order to build plays, playwrights must have a keen understanding of the workings of theatre, knowing a play is a physical story to be embodied by actors, and interpreted by directors and designers. There is a craft to this process in which it’s helpful to think of plays as having various parts; conflict, characters, dialogue, stage directions, plots, and subplots, and, like the wooden beams of a well-made house or the ingredients of your favorite recipe, they will, if you’re lucky, create a structure with dramatic energy, a sense of forward movement in which the struggles of each character reveal something with which each of us can feel and identify.
A Bit of History
Playwrights have been making an impact on audiences ever since the first plays were performed. The earliest playwrights not only wrote the text but also cast and directed their own productions. During the Elizabethan Age, playwrights like William Shakespeare re-invented the English language, expanding with at least 1,700 new words still used today. The emergence of realism during the nineteenth century took over theatre in western Europe and continues to shape the way we tell stories.
When Irish playwright John Synge’s, The Playboy of the Western World, premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on January 26, 1907, instead of appl