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As a theater producer who specialized in new plays, I used to read hundreds of new scripts each year. At least 80% of them were pretty terrible. At least 80% were more or less based on TV conventions. These two things are not, I believe, unrelated.
Playwrights, a modest proposal: if you're serious about learning to write for the stage, you need to turn off your TV right now. Go cold turkey for at least a year. This draconian prescription is based not on a moral imperative but on practical grounds. The conventions and rhythms of television make for deadly theater. Because of the thousands of hours of television you've already witnessed, its electronic lessons are now imbedded in your neural circuits. You have many, many things to unlearn.
Cameras Playwrights who use TV dramas, soaps, or sitcoms as models for their scripts are at a profound disadvantage in the theater. They conveniently forget that television dialogue has an almighty ally that is forever denied the playwright: the camera.
Before you banish your TV, spend a few days watching television shows from a stance of pure technical observation. Start with the sound turned off, and simply concentrate on the flow of images. You'll immediately begin to notice several things. First, the TV camera is almost never still. Each scene is punctuated many times per minute by a change of camera position or angle.
Second, you'll discover that most of the time you're looking at faces. Camera close-ups constantly bring the audience right up to the actors' eyes and lips. The audience is being cued to respond to private emotional moments, expressed in gestures as intimate as the flutter of an eyelash.
Now turn the sound back up and pay close attention to how the dialogue and the camera work together.
- How often, in an exchange of relatively ordinary conversation, does the camera snap back and forth from face to face?
- How often does the camera follow the action into another room, or quickly jump to another setting?
- How often do you witness a major dramatic moment without special assistance from musical underscoring or a reaction shot?
- And how often is a suspenseful moment punctuated by a commercial break?
Until you spend some time doing these exercises, you won't become aware of how much help TV dialogue gets from its technical allies.
Talking Heads When that same dialogue is placed on a stage, an odd transformation occurs. More often than not, it feels pedestrian, dull, static, dated. An audience will start to feel impatient without exactly knowing why. If you study TV dialogue, you'll discover that most television writing is the last bastion of nineteenth century "realistic" melodrama, tarted up with camera movements. The manipulations of editing make a TV script's rhythms seem quicker than it actually is. Stripped of the camera's domination, the dialogue bogs down.
Unlike TV, on stage we never see "talking heads" unless, like in Samuel Beckett's plays, they are trapped in urns or buried to the neck in sand. Instead of expressive faces, a theater audience sees the actors' whole bodies moving around in space. If the dialogue is static, without sufficient stage action, those bodies start to look like lumps on a sofa, itching for something to do.
I've watched directors struggle to create a blocking plan for talky made-for-TV style plays, desperately trying to come up with reasons for actors to move rather than sit twiddling their thumbs during long stretches of actionless dialogue. When either actors or director feels compelled to invent actions for the characters, a playwright hasn't fully done the job.
Dialogue by itself doesn't make a stage play. A playwright's basic building blocks are units of action -- complex human behaviors that the audience witnesses.
Sitcoms and Series Writing Playwrights need to be wary of emulating TV scripts for another important reason. All sitcoms and most TV dramas, except for anthologies, are written in a series format: that is, they are written for and around continuing characters.
Characters in a TV series tend to start out as easily identifiable, stock stereotypes (e.g., the brain, the womanizer, the foxy blonde, the goof). They get a chance to develop more three-dimensional personalities over the life of the series. The plots, or situations, are "episodes", and each one is far less important than the audience's long-term experience of spending time with familiar, likable characters it comes to know and identify with.
After its introductory episode, each series script is partially pre-sold to its audience, because its purportedly stand-alone plot is built on a whole world of details about characters and setting which the audience already knows. As former Vice President Quayle discovered to his dismay about Murphy Brown, characters in a popular series can become as real and familiar to viewers as their friends and family.
Guess what, playwrights? You have none of these luxuries. Your characters, unless they're based on very well-known historical figures, won't have a personal history that your audience already knows from a season of reruns. With very few exceptions, the world of your play begins at lights down and disappears at final curtain. You have to create that world, supply it with all necessary exposition, and populate it with characters developed enough to keep an audience's interest and gain its empathy during your play's brief hour or two upon the stage.
Furthermore, TV series are often created for major personalities, like nationally-known comics, and stuffed with material that has been directly tailored to their talents. But your plays are not going to feature the latest stand-up phenomenon. Instead of gigantic, eccentric personalities, actors will have to make your characters live -- actors who can reasonably be found in the talent pools of the regional, small professional, or community theaters in your area.
One of the reasons that comedies by Neil Simon and Larry Shue are staples in all levels of theaters is that even marginally competent actors can perform their scripts and they'll still be worth watching, because it is the stories themselves, not the star performers, that have the laughs built in.
Miscellaneous TV Pitfalls TV writing takes advantage of other technical capabilities that playwrights cannot take for granted.
- Laugh tracks. Though there are now exceptions, most sitcoms are still punched up with laugh tracks which help inflate lame jokes. Rest assured that most theater audiences will not oblige you with the same guffaws and bursts of "spontaneous" applause that the laugh track specialist provides.
- Character entrances and exits. On stage, there is no camera to pan away from a character who has no lines or action. Actors will litter the stage like unused furniture unless the playwright moves them on or off with a specific activity. I can usually tell if a playwright has been watching too much TV when there are scenes full of inert people who have only an occasional line.
- Props, sets, scene changes. TV is "realistic" -- meaning that, except for pop-art exceptions like Pee Wee's Playhouse, most TV set designers try to make a room appear life-like. In the theater, though it is technically possible to create a realistic room in a one-set show, it is rarely possible to move between many realistic settings. Playwrights who write short TV-length scenes (7-8 minutes) expecting frequent realistic set changes are immediately recognizable as rank amateurs. As TV and film has become stepped in realism, most contemporary theater writing has swung back toward nonrealistic, imaginative bare stage forms, where less is more.
While You're Drying Out Now that you've resolutely unplugged your tube and put it in the back of your closet, what the heck are you supposed to do with your evenings? During your visual withdrawal spasms, you need to go to every play, play reading, and performance event you can afford. If you can't afford them, go anyway: offer to usher, or beg a reduced rate, or sneak in. I know several well-known playwrights who used to mingle with crowds at intermission and see a whole season of Broadway second acts.
There are several compelling reasons why would-be playwrights need to attend as much theater as humanly possible. First, you need to learn from your artistic peers, and you learn the most by experiencing their work in the form it was intended. Reading playscripts may familiarize you with the literature of theater, but not with the joys and surprises of its embodied form. It's like looking at opera scores; if you're very experienced in a musical vocabulary, you can imagine a lot of it, but it's still nothing like hearing the music.
Neither books nor TV can ever give you the primal, carnal theater experience: being in the living presence of actors performing the comedies and dramas of the human condition. Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan called TV a "cool" medium, one that was essentially electronic and distant. Theater, by contrast, may be the "hottest" of all art forms because witnessing the joys and suffering of living beings who inhabit the same room and share the very air we breathe can touch us in a profound way.
And besides, now that live theater is rapidly becoming a fringe art form -- partly because everyone else is zoned out watching TV! --- if we playwrights don't patronize the theater and become passionate advocates of its special human connection, who on earth will?