People have been writing and staging plays in one way or another for as long as there have been people. Cave dwellers, tribal dancers, religious groups, social historians, satirists, psychologists, revolutionaries, political pundits, philosophers, lunatics, prisoners, show-biz razzle-dazzlers and Hollywood’s so-called “dream merchants” have all used the ancient art of playwriting to satisfy a basic need to reflect the world in which they lived. Shakespeare probably said it best (as usual) when he put these words in Hamlet’s mouth: “The purpose of playing… both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

When we sit down to write a play we sit down with our mirror in hand and decide in which direction we want to turn it to reflect some aspect of our world. It’s a big world (which makes the task seem overwhelming), and each of us experiences it a little differently (which makes the task worthwhile), so our first problem is to choose an image of the world to reflect that will be interesting to us and to others.

“Interesting” is an interesting word. Different people find different things interesting in life. But in the theater the most interesting things are the things we all share as human beings. Since we don’t all share the same ideas about things, just discussing a bunch of different ideas on stage isn’t usually too interesting (this kind of show is better left to a formal debate). Of course characters in plays do have ideas, otherwise they wouldn’t reflect human nature very well at all, but those ideas are linked to something more common, or universal, in our nature: our emotions. From ancient times to modern, across cultures and religions and political systems people have always found a shared realm in the kingdom of Emotions. Good plays explore the emotions of their characters. And because our human emotions are usually most lively when we are in relationships with one another, good plays place characters in relationships with one another that engage and challenge the characters’ emotions. Then the magic happens: the audience gets involved emotionally, too, simply because they can relate to what the characters on stage are feeling (whether or not they agree with the characters’ ideas, personal choices or fashion sense).

Now we have a first criterion to follow when making our writing choice:

• Does the play I want to write involve relationships that can provoke emotions?

A painting of a landscape can be very moving to the viewer, but a play about a landscape won’t work very well, unless the writer personifies the hills and trees and sky so that they can relate to one another emotionally. In fact, many ancient plays about gods and demons and heroes did exactly that in order to emotionally and spiritually unify the citizens of the societies in which the plays were performed. The sun, the mountains, the rain, trees, caves and seas became characters who were invested with human emotions in their interplay with one another. And they usually had stormy relationships.

In life when everyone is getting along peacefully, it’s nice; in a play, it’s boring. That’s because nobody’s emotions are being challenged, so nobody’s growing or changing. When something challenges our emotions, we react, we do something about it. What we choose to do causes whomever we’re involved with to react and do something in return. What we end up with is a chain of actions that proceed by cause and effect. In the end, whenever the end may be to the chain, we have probably changed in some way. Maybe we no longer have that person in our life, or we turned a new leaf, or learned a lesson that causes us to look at our life differently. This doesn’t happen every day, of course, at least not in a big way. These chains of events brought on by emotional challenges are the dramatic moments in our lives. These are the moments that make good plays. Sometimes they’re big, explosive things that shake life down to the foundation (like in Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet), other times they’re little personal earthquakes (like when Jim kisses Laura in The Glass Menagerie, then goes out of her life again, leaving her with only a memory and a delicate broken glass unicorn). In either case, we now have three criteria for drama. Including our first, they are:

1. A situation in which emotions are being challenged in personal relationships;
2. A chain of cause and effect stemming from the characters’ actions;
3. A change in the behavior and/or awareness of the characters involved.

The next thing we have to do is figure out how to focus our story. Good storytelling has a central character. Playwriting is a form of storytelling, of course, and the importance of a central character in a play is no different than in any narrative fiction. A central character offers a distinct point of view and gives the audience a principal subject to relate to emotionally. The central character is our entry point to the drama. This character is the one who faces the primary emotional challenges, and whose life is most affected by the outcome of events.

At the beginning of your play, the central character should already be in the midst of some significant emotional challenge. This emotional stew is like a petri dish in a chemistry lab containing some volatile element. The condition is unstable, so that the right element added to it can start a chain reaction. Traditional playwriting has named this conditional state the “situation of the action.”

Something or someone then enters the situation and causes the central character to react in a big way. More questions are raised for the character which must be answered, or a goal appears which must be accomplished, and the character needs to take action in order to get those answers or accomplish that goal. The thing that started this chain reaction is called “the inciting incident,” and the central character’s pursuit of answers and goals is called the “rising action” of the drama. Usually, the inciting incident happens somewhere near the beginning of the play, and the rising action takes up the majority of the play’s length.

Take Hamlet again as an example of the above ideas. At the beginning of Shakespeare’s drama, Hamlet is an emotional mess because his father the king has just died and his uncle, the new king, has married Hamlet’s mother very soon after Hamlet’s father’s death. There are also spooky, supernatural things going on on the battlements of the castle. All this together is summed up when Marcellus, the Night Watch, says that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (the situation of the action). Then, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to Hamlet and tells him that Hamlet’s uncle murdered him in order to usurp the throne, and also seduced Hamlet’s mother. The ghost tells Hamlet to take revenge (the inciting incident). Hamlet now has some big questions to answer along the way to his appointed goal. The challenges facing him are physical, emotional, philosophical, theological and psychological. His pursuit of answers and possible revenge (the rising action) takes up the next few hours of the play because he’s just not sure if he can or should do it.

When the central character takes action on all the emotional challenges presented to him or her, we should care. It’s the playwright’s job to reveal the motivation of not only the central character, but of all the characters so that we can relate to them on a human level. This is a big part of the craft of playwriting, and stems from asking an important question:

• What are the elements of my characters’ lives that are affecting their choices?

Asking the question is one thing, but getting the answers into the play is another. Have you ever seen a play or movie where a character just starts randomly talking about who they are and what they feel and why they feel that way? Pretty dreary. Dramatists use a technique that causes such things to be revealed because they must be, and not just at random. This technique is based on a familiar word: conflict.

• When writing a play, if you put characters in conflict with one another, they will begin to reveal who they are while trying to resolve the conflict through their actions.

Again, the idea mirrors life; you often learn more about people from their actions than from their words. After they do something, especially something challenging or surprising, there may be some explanation needed. Take that kiss in The Glass Menagerie again:

After Jim, the Gentleman Caller, kisses Laura, he realizes he has taken a costly action and must explain himself. He knows Laura has a terrible crush on him (because he’s seen her awkward, tongue-tied actions when she’s near him), but he also knows he’s going to have to leave her with just the memory of that one kiss (but we don’t know that yet). We know he’s a nice guy (not because he told us, but because we saw him work overtime to be kind to this strange, shy girl–to draw her out and to give her a pleasant evening in spite of the fact that he feels a little like he was trapped into this situation). We also know he’s a little full of himself (because we heard him brag some about his accomplishments, not just to hear himself talk, but to entertain and instruct Laura), and we saw that he’s the kind of guy that likes to see how big his shadow can stretch across a room.

All of these things we learned through the characters actions. What we don’t know about Jim is that he’s seriously involved in another romantic relationship. The conflict stemming from the kiss and the crush causes this crucial information to come out. He needs for Laura to know that he’s not just a “love-‘em and leave-’em” kind of guy, so he must explain the circumstances of his life. In doing so, Tennessee Williams, the playwright, reveals Jim’s motivation for leaving Laura behind. The emotional effect on Laura–and on the audience–is stunning. Until that point, Laura–and we– had hoped in our hearts that there was some chance that she and Jim could be together. But no. Williams has set up the conflicts so that the characters’ actions have profound effects on them. And through the conflicts, we find out just exactly who each person really is. Think how boring this scene would be if it all started out with Jim saying: “If I happen to kiss you tonight, Laura, don’t expect me to stick around because I’m goin’ steady with a girl named Betty.”

It’s worth pointing out that neither Jim nor Laura is the central character of The Glass Menagerie. That’s Tom. His big conflict is with his Mom, Amanda, and most of it has to do with bringing Jim home to meet his sister Laura. His motivation to do this is all tied up in the fact that he feels smothered in this house by his mother’s demands and his sister’s immense, even painful shyness. Tom states his motivation clearly at one point: “How do you get out of a coffin without removing a single nail.” His home is a coffin to him, his mother and sister the nails holding him in, but he loves each of them enough that he doesn’t want to hurt them. Williams reveals to us a great deal about Tom Wingfield through all his conflicts. But the playwright can’t develop one character only. All the characters in the play have to have a fully-rounded personality, with their own points of view and motivations drawn from the specific circumstances of their individual lives. Again, this reflects the world. None of us see things exactly the same way because we’ve all lived different lives.

• The playwright must get inside the head and heart of each character and find out what makes them tick from that character’s own personal point of view.

The best playwrights don’t judge their characters. But they do understand them, and they reveal the things that let the audience understand them as well. We might not like Jim for walking out on Laura, but we understand why he did it. Likewise, we might not like Hamlet for killing poor old Polonius, but the motivation that brought him to that unfortunate murderous action is made very clear by Shakespeare.

There comes a time in your story when the central character (and the audience) finds out whether or not he/she will get the answers and/or accomplish the goal. This is called the “dramatic climax.” The climax doesn’t always have to be the most explosive moment of the drama, but always marks the point when there’s no turning back. The climax involves some action taken that changes everything. Sometimes the central character takes that action, and sometimes an action is taken by some other character that irrevocably affects the central character’s pursuit. In Menagerie, after Jim leaves Laura due to his impending marriage, Tom realizes he has no chance to achieve his goal. The arranged “date” backfires and indirectly causes Tom to face a new reality. He accepts that Laura will always be alone and knows he will always be trapped under his mother’s thumb as long as he lives in this house. There’s no way he can live his own life without hurting them. He and his mother Amanda then have a huge blow-up. Often the most explosive moments of the drama happen after the climax. The exciting, deadly fencing match in Hamlet, for example, happens after the climax. The climax came as a result of Hamlet’s direct action, when in his “play within the play” he “catches the conscience of the king” and assures himself that the ghost’s information was trustworthy (others may say that the climax actually occurs a little later, when, as a result of Ophelia’s suicide, Hamlet overcomes his own fear of mortality as is finally ready to take action–then on to that fencing match). Maybe an even better example of a climax brought on by the direct action of the central character is when Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Sure, it was an accident, but she’s the one holding the bucket. She now has defeated her nemesis and has what the Wizard told her she needs (the witch’s broomstick) in order to accomplish her main goal of getting back to Kansas. But there’s plenty more to come in the last half hour.

After the climax, we’re always left with the question, “What now?” The answers to this question make up the “falling action,” or “dénouement.” In the end, the chain of events that was set in motion by the emotional challenges, first to the central character, then to the other characters in turn, should have a real effect on the characters lives. They should be in some way changed by the drama, or what was the point of having to go through the whole story? Romeo and Juliet’s lives are certainly changed by their drama because they’re both dead at the end, but if the other characters in the drama–their families–were in the same place at the end as at the beginning, the tragedy would have no point. The tragic death of the young lovers serves to end the family hatred and teaches the parents the error of their ways. One change (the death) is physical, the other (the peacemaking), is psychological.

Significant change in human beings is not always visible on the surface, sometimes it happens in the mind and heart. The dramatist can deal with both kinds of change. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy discovers that the Wizard is a “humbug” and that she has everything she needs to get home. In Menagerie, Tom has changed everything for his mother and sister by leaving them devastated and alone. As the narrator of the play, an older Tom tells us that he himself has been forever changed by that act. He gained his freedom, but he has been haunted by these emotional memories since that day. And, for the artist/playwright, Tom (Tennessee Williams’ reflected self), the only way to deal with this complex, painful reality is to reflect it for us in the mirror of the play he claims to have written about “his mother, Amanda, his sister, Laura, and a Gentleman Caller who… is the long delayed but always expected something that we live for.”

Try applying these playwriting criteria to some of your favorite plays, then try the same thing with August Wilson’s Jitney. Answer the following questions. Some of the answers may be pretty clear, others can generate discussion or debate, depending on how you interpret the play.

1. Who is the central character?
2. What are the emotional challenges facing the central character at the outset of the play?
3. What happens to put the character into action?
4. What conflicts arise in the course of the action?
5. What do we learn about the motivation of each of the characters? What are the life elements influencing who they are and what they want?
6. What is each character doing to get what he or she wants?
7. What is the dramatic climax, i.e., where do you know whether the central character will or will not get what he or she has been after?
8. What has changed for the characters at the end of the drama emotionally, physically and/or psychologically?

All the examples given here are from full-length plays. Shorter plays may be less complicated, but usually contain all these elements as well.

The question of research in playwriting, or in any type of fiction writing, is one that presents numerous rewards and several traps.  To enumerate a few of the obvious rewards, we might include:

• rich, realistic backgrounds for your characters and a detailed sense of the environment in which they function;
• a sense of undeniable truth stemming from work that is based on verifiable facts, figures and events;
• a palpable connection with history and historical people (recently alive or long gone, known or unknown);
• an audience acceptance that the author has turned him/herself into an authority on the subject at hand, and, thus, should know whereof h/she speaks (this implies a level of trustworthiness that the researcher/playwright must achieve);
• and the pure satisfaction of stretching your own and your audience’s knowledge into new and interesting areas of human endeavor, behavior and development.

We’ll get to the traps a little later.  For now, let’s stay on the rewards.  An oft-repeated tenet of creative writing is “write what you know.”  But what if you’re interested in something or someplace or someone that you don’t know, or at least with which or with whom you haven’t had first-hand life experience?  Does that mean “hands off” or “steer clear?”  If that were so, Shakespeare wouldn’t have written most of his plays!  This is where research comes in.

Maybe the best way to think of your research is as a creative act in itself—an exploration through various types of first and second-hand source material that allows you to imagine lives that have been lived outside of your personal experience, but within the “body-electric,”* the collective human pulse.  Our research is our finger on that pulse, and like the very act of theatre-making as a whole, is designed to explore and celebrate the commonality of our being, and not just the differences and distances between us.

It seems to me that there are two main reasons for researching a subject.  First, you may already know enough about it that it interests you, and you want to find out more so you can write about it with the trustworthy authority talked of above.  Secondly, you may know very little about the subject and for whatever reason (your producer, editor or teacher assigned you to this one) you must inform yourself and find points of interest that may make a good story.  Your work here, with Theatrelink, will most likely encompass both categories:  1) you are being asked to research your community, which, of course, you already know something about (but you’ll probably have many gaps to fill) and, 2) you may need to “find” your story in your community’s recent and/or past history.   Where do you go to get these answers and inspiration?

* from “Leaves of Grass,” by Walt Whitman

Research sources are characteristically described as primary (first hand) and secondary (second hand).  Primary sources are the best.  They are made up of original documents, images, artifacts and eye-witness accounts about people and events.

Secondary sources are generally books and articles written about the subject by other researchers.  Biographies, scholarly treatises, magazine articles, news editorials and opinions are all secondary accounts.

Primary sources   

A great place to start in looking for primary source material is with living people whose actual lives intersect with your subject material.  These are people who know (for stories set in the present), or remember (for stories set in the past) and who, in either case, paid attention.  Interviews with relatives, friends, or community leaders versed in your community’s recent and more distant history and demographics are a great place to start.  Next, the local library or your school library may contain many original documents and/or images: old photos, deeds, community records, works of art, maps, legal documents, even old newspaper reports will unveil a wealth of information that may jog the mind and inspire the imagination.

The creative researcher can decipher and arrange material in many ways to discover—or to invent!— a dramatic story.  The important challenge here is to find a story, or the basis of a story, that contains the principal elements of drama: interesting characters set in conflict, preferably over issues that threaten or promise to change their lives for better or worse.

On the other hand, when a story is already partially invented, the research will serve to round out points of interest or blank spots.   The research may also move a stalled plot forward by discovering an interesting turn of actual events.  You will search for historical clues or true facts (often stranger than fiction) that enrich and deepen the characters, enhance the story’s background and tone, and provide or suggest interesting occurrences that can feature into your plot.

You might also discover interesting dialogue, and authentic diction, in the public words of historical characters.  In some instances, it may be colorful, appropriate (and legal) to use actual words, speeches, writings of an historic character or public figure.  But researching the language style and diction of a community through public records can also lend a strong sense of reality to fictional people and events.  I’d refer the playwright/researcher to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as a fine example of evocative “period” diction and well-researched background detail that informs a largely fictional plot based on true events.

Other primary source material that might be easily overlooked may be readily on view in your community.  Buildings with meaningful architecture or unique geographic features can make for some great, unique settings to your play.  Often an evocative setting can do as much to inspire the imagination as a reported string of actual events.

Secondary sources

The benefit or using secondary sources is that you can get a lot of information from one source, but you must realize that you are actually just using the work of another researcher who has put in the time and energy to write his/her book or article.  You must 1) assure yourself that the source is trustworthy, and 2) duly credit the authors of the secondary sources in some appropriate manner, at least with some testimony or acknowledgement.  In the scholarly world, this opens a wealth of legal issues that have to do with the ownership of “intellectual material.”   For now, let your conscience be your guide.  Generally, don’t claim any work as original that that you didn’t discover or that you didn’t invent from original sources.

Again, primary sources are the best; try to get your information first-hand.  But, if you have come across a useful secondary account, try to corroborate the source.  Most bios and periodicals of integrity cite their own primary source material, which you can often locate.

Other sources and some “traps”  

Encyclopedias and academic textbooks are generally useful for collecting facts and figures, but rarely take you into the heart of your characters and places—for this you need your primary research and your creative intuition.   A great old portrait of a character may tell you more than a dry facts-and-figures account of age, weight and favorite food. (On second thought, “favorite food” probably can take you a good distance into a character):

Scene 1: Napoleon sits at his table in a field tent with a map of the world spread before him.  He calls out:

NAPLEON

“Gustave!  What’s for lunch!?”

GUSTAVE

“Chicken Meringue, Excellency.

NAPOLEON

Superbe, Gustave!  C’est ma préféré! * I’m in such a good mood that I won’t  invade Russia!

*from information reported in “The Joy of Cooking,” a dubious, but entertaining fact that I haven’t (yet) corroborated from a primary source (the diaries of Napoleon’s chef?).

At the beginning of this little article I spoke about the “traps” of research.  One such trap occurs as we get away from the primary and secondary sources mentioned above.

And so, now a word of warning about the Internet.   Movies, plays, and other works of fiction dealing with similar communities and time periods as yours can be very useful in giving you a deeper sense mood, character, and nuanced story-telling, but should never be recycled as source material for your story.  This is, at best, cheap writing and, at worst, plagiarism.  Some writers even try to steer clear of similar-themed works of art while writing so as to avoid borrowed thinking.  Others suffuse themselves with works by and about the period and subject.  Some of us are capable of borrowing without even realizing it: artistic sponges who see and read lots and lots of stuff.  This can makes for very informed writers, but sponges must constantly wring themselves out when writing creatively in order to ensure original thought.

Another trap of research is the proverbial rabbit hole.  When we open a research subject, we begin going through tiny doors that intrigue and mystify.  These often open onto other rooms and tunnels that may lead us far from our starting point, threatening to get us hopelessly lost, frustrated, and confused.  It’s important to research your subject specifically and not to feel as if you must learn everything before employing anything in your story.

One of the best techniques may be to work with research questions to which you want specific answers.  For example, in writing Translations, Brian Friel more probably asked “What works of classical literature might have been studied in Ireland’s hedge schools in the 1800’s?” rather than “What was the state of education in Ireland in the nineteenth century?”  I frankly don’t know what he actually had to ask himself.  But, in making my point, I offer this: he is writing about a specific community, and about a few people who live there, not about all of Ireland.  He is writing about that community being overtaken by an “invading” force from a domineering foreign land, hence the Latin study of The Aeneid becomes both an historically accurate detail in the schoolroom (these people studied Latin sources), and a resonant metaphor for the overarching themes of the story (read the final speech of the play).  Friel takes a dry detail from life and weaves it into a beautiful artistic tapestry.

Finally, research can sometimes make us feel shackled to the truth, which is often not so interesting, convenient, or dynamic as we’d like it to be for the sake of our play.  The needs of the play should come first.  That is not to say that the playwright should just plain lie about history in order to create a better play, but that the writer should conceive and arrange the play so as to liberate it from real life.  Again, Friel’s Translations is a good example.  He created a fictional village named Ballybeg.  In this village he placed several fictional characters, who, in a sense, represented or stood in for the very real forces that were actually influencing Irish and English history at the time.  Thus, the character of the British officer, Lancey, in Act One becomes the personified representation of the historical English patronage (and patronizing) of Ireland, and in Act Two becomes the face of English wrath and domination.  Had Friel been bound to the absolute facts, he would have found it unlikely if not impossible to uncover a single figure in history who filled these dual roles so poetically.  Pedants are confined by facts, poets use facts to imagine artful fictions.  Friel, in wishing to rouse the passions of the audience, could burn down his imaginary Ballybeg; he could not have burned down a real city that never actually burned without history crying “foul!”  Unless you have stumbled upon a brilliant true-life drama that fulfills all the tenets of good drama (a very tall order), you should rather set yourself to learn the facts, and invent a fiction based on them.  Then you can burn it down or shoot the moon, as the themes of your drama demand.

Some “Tools of the Trade”

Certain tools are often employed by playwrights that, when used circumspectly, can maintain the “truth” while bending, stretching, or even ignoring certain facts.  One technique, for example, may be to compress time and space in order to give your story more coherence and force.  “But the Johnstown flood happened in June, 1889, and my grandmother married my grandfather in January!  How can I say the flood seemed like a warning from the gods that the wedding would be a disaster when the two events were six months apart?”  Maybe it wouldn’t be a lie, for the purposes of your entertaining fiction, to make it a June wedding in your play (I’d move the wedding instead of the flood, which is a well-documented historical disaster, or, better yet, invent some different grandparents based on your own).  Or, maybe Thomas Edison and Jules Verne never really had lunch at the top of the Eiffel Tower (or did they?  Who would like to do the research?), but they could have!  Compression of time, place and events is a valid and often-used tool.  Likewise, starting with a true fact or event, then inventing, or interpolating a story based on sound research, can lend great results.

Take as example of interpolation Robert Bolt’s fine “historical drama,” A Man For All Seasons.  Bolt invents a character called only “The Common Man,” who, in playing numerous functionary characters throughout the play, makes wry factual and philosophical comments on the sway of history and the whims of great men.  Likewise, in this same play, there’s a terrific imagined scene (so I suppose) in which Henry VIII pays an impromptu visit to Sir Thomas More’s home.  The king wants to convince the Catholic holy man (soon to be Lord Chancellor) to condone Henry’s own wish to divorce and remarry for the sake of a male heir to the English Throne.  In the course of the visit, Henry startles More’s naïve country wife, Alice, when he sets his muscular, stockinged leg directly in front of her prim face:

HENRY

That’s a dancer’s leg!

Perhaps there was such a private meeting between these historical figures, perhaps Alice More was as prim and unworldly as Bolt portrays her, perhaps not.  Bolt does use many of More’s actual words throughout this play, mostly from More’s public writings, but the vibrant dialogue spoken between Henry and Thomas in Bolt’s imagining of the scene in question is mostly Bolt’s invention, bringing flesh and blood, humor, wit and passion to characters that might, in the history books, seem dry or distant or inhuman.

Take as a final example of using facts to create elegant, poetic fiction, this passage from Translations.  In it, the distraught Maire – desperately clinging to hope that her beloved English soldier, Yolland, has not met with foul play – draws a map in the dirt depicting what she knows of his former life.

He comes from a tiny wee place called Winfarthing. (She suddenly drops on her hands and knees to the floor…and with her finger traces an outline map.)  Come here till you see.  Look.  There’s Winfarthing.  And there’s two other wee villages right beside it; one of them’s called Barton Bendish – it’s there; and the other’s called Saxingham Nethergate – it’s about there.  And there’s Little Walsingham – that’s his mother’s townland.  Aren’t they odd names?  Sure they make no sense to me at all.  And WInfarthing’s near a big town called Norwich.  And Norwich is in a county called Norfolk.  And Norfolk is in the east of England.  He drew a map for me on the wet strand and wrote the names on it.   I have it all in my head now: Winfarthing – Barton Bendish   –  Saxingham Nethergate – Little Walsingham – Norwich – Nofolk. Strange sounds aren’t they?  But nice sounds, like Jimmy Jack reciting his Homer.

Translations, Act III, pp.437-38

Behavior

The activities and actions of the actors (including line readings, pauses, attitudes, etc.) through which they manifest the underlying psychology of the characters they are portraying. Though closely allied to the idea of “blocking” (q.v.), behavior is the more inclusive term, incorporating all the subtle nuances of the actors’ characterizations.

Back story

That portion of a dramatized story which occurs before the play’s action begins— that is, before the curtain rises. The back story is conveyed to an audience through exposition in a way that seems natural and does not interrupt the play’s dramatic momentum.

Blocking

The planned movements of the actors around the stage. Effective blocking should seem like natural, spontaneous, and motivated behavior while at the same time expressing in kinetic and pictorial terms the underlying tensions and conflicts in the drama.

Character

Dramatic characters are usually dynamic— that is to say, they participate in the play’s action and in so doing, change and grow. What they do defines who they are; moreover, their actions carry the drama forward.

Conflict

The struggle that grows out of the interplay of two opposing forces. These forces are generally embodied in two main characters, typically termed the “protagonist” and “antagonist.” Conflict is generally motivated by the characters’ desires to attain opposing goals or objectives.

Downstage

The part of the stage nearest the audience. When an actor walks toward the audience, they are said to be moving “downstage.”

Dramatic climax

The peak of the story when the central character’s fate is determined. It involves some action that cannot be reversed.

Exposition

The introductory material in a play that gives the setting, introduces the characters, and supplies other facts – including the back story – necessary to understanding.

Falling action

The unraveling of events after the climax. Also referred to as the denouement.

Floor plan

A scale diagram of the set as seen from above.

Inciting incident

The event in a play – or in a specific scene – which catalyzes the drama. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the inciting incident is the girls’ dancing in the forest. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is the appearance of the ghost on the battlements. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the inciting incident of Act I is the drugstore scene between George and Emily. In Proof, Catherine’s discovery that Hal has stolen one of her father’s notebooks catalyzes the action.

Motivated space

The characteristic of a floor plan that provides reasons (motivations) for actors to use the entire stage space. For example, a floor plan with a door in one wall, a window in another, a set of chairs and loveseats in one corner, and a bar in another will provide the actors with ample opportunity to move about freely. Such a floor plan is enormously useful in staging a play. It’s been said that 80 percent of the blocking of a play is predetermined by the floor plan.

Objective

What a character wants in a scene or a play. Character objectives create purposeful behavior; opposing objectives in the central characters form the basis of a play’s conflicts. In Hamlet, for example, the objective of both Hamlet and Claudius may be articulated as a desire to expunge the rot from Denmark. Each character has diametrically opposite views of the nature and source of the rot.

Plot

A planned series of interrelated actions progressing because of the interplay of two opposing forces to a climax and a denouement (adapted from William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard, A Handbook to Literature, New York: Odyssey Press, 1960).

Key characteristics of dramatic plot therefore include the following:

1) Its incidents are selected by the playwright from the overall story and ordered for maximum expressive force.

2) It consists of at least three actions or events (beginning, middle, end). If one incident is omitted, the plot falls apart and no longer makes sense (imagine omitting Romeo’s killing Tybalt from the plot of Romeo and Juliet).

3) The incidents are linked and propelled by conflict.

Rising action

A character’s pursuit of answers and goals sparked by the inciting incident. This typically makes up the bulk of the play.

Setting

The physical, and often spiritual and psychological, background against which the action of a drama takes place. The term setting encompasses 1) the physical details of the world depicted; 2) the time or period in which the action occurs; 3) the general environment of the characters, e.g., the mental, emotional, moral, and social conditions through which they move. In the theatre, setting is evoked by both the physical sets and by the characters’ behavior (see Set Designer).

Situation of the action

The condition under which the characters are living at the outset of the play. This condition usually involves some physical, emotional, or psychological instability.

Stage left

The direction to an actor’s left as they face the audience.

Stage right

The direction to an actor’s right as they face the audience.

Stage business

The actors’ activities on stage (e.g., lighting a lamp, drinking tea, etc.).

Staging

The process of mounting a production, in particular the arrangement of actors’ moves and activities to convey the play’s story (see blocking).

Story

A chronological series of events from which the dramatist forms his/her plot. The span of the story is almost always greater than that of the plot. For example, the story of Romeo and Juliet begins with the origins of the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. The plot begins shortly before the meeting between Romeo and Juliet, which is the play’s inciting incident.

Subtext

A character’s inner life, their unspoken thoughts. While a fortune-seeker is professing undying love to an unsuspecting heiress, for example, their subtext may have to do with appraising her jewelry and furnishings. Two teenagers on a first date may be making innocuous small talk; their subtext may be concerned about their own appearance (“Does she think I’m a geek?”), what will happen next (“Is he going to kiss me?”), etc. The tension between text and subtext adds texture and dimension to a scene.

Swatch

A small piece of fabric used by designers to indicate a fabric they intend to use for a costume.

Upstage

The part of the stage farthest from the audience. When an actor walks toward the back of the stage, they are said to be moving “upstage.”

Introducing the QFT into your classroom practice

QFT Procedure

Experiencing the QFT