Three Tricks To Writing For Stage
How to Make the Most of Writing Theatrical Productions
Feb 20, 2008
Writing for actors is tricky business. Their craft, like yours, puts most of its eggs in the basket of creation. If you throw a big, heavy book into that basket, the eggs break, and all that remains is a sulfuric rotten egg smell that sucks for everyone. Read on for the essential steps to avoiding this odiferous result.
1.) A Light Touch
The trick to writing a play that an actor (and for that matter, a good director, a creative scenic director, and an energetic props master) will appreciate is to write with a very light touch. Your job as playwright is to supply dialogue and necessary information. Overwriting a piece will limit your players’ creativity, and that of the design team, and will lead to a bulky, cumbersome play.
2.) Know Your Place
In playwriting, the writer’s job is to write. Writing, as said before, means supplying plot, dialogue, and necessary, pertinent, interesting information. Writing does not include any of the following duties:
- Set design. Even in a historical play in which you know the exact measurements and appearance of Anne Frank’s lonely, famous annex, you should understand going in that if they want a real place, the design team knows where to find it: the internet. Instead of giving off the measurements of the annex, say, “Location: The Annex.”
- Costume design. Costumes are very important, especially to characters and the actors who portray them. It’s okay to foray into this zone, but foray none too far: costume designers, like set and scene designers, do not like to be told what to do. A red scarf, fine. A finely-pressed pin-striped suit of about 30% gray cotton twill -- or whatever: No.
- Blocking. No one cares what you have to say about blocking. You’re not writing for the same stage they’re performing on.
3.) Do Not Overwrite
An actor is a creature of instinct, and giving specific directions will hinder him unfairly. Many directors, in the early stages of development, will sit back, put their feet up on the chair in front of them, gesture expansively and say, “Go where it takes you,” or “Do what feels right.” If your book is filled with obtuse, overwrought language, an actor simply glazes over them and moves as the dialogue compels him.
In a piece of prose fiction, having a character stutter out, “But… But I never, I mean, how was I, uh, supposed to know… that… that…” works fine. Asking an actor to follow these ellipses, pauses and repetitions is unfair. Your speech pattern, as it translates into this controlled utterance, may confound a player who doesn’t speak the same way. Any line like this will be improvised away.
These suggestions may make it seem as though you are sacrificing a great deal of control for little reason at all, but there is a hidden and powerful benefit: Like writing a haiku, which forces out all but the most essential words and phrases and creates an atomic molecule of poetry, so too can paring down a play and writing it for who it should be written for. Sacrificing your prose ambitions allows you to write a true play, reveling in amazing, appealing dialogue and tight, focused and beautiful stories.
What you give up in control over direction minutiae, take back in control of well-written lines, elegant characters and memorable plotting. The director does their part, the actors theirs, and you do yours. Doing only your part, knowing your place and occupying it with magnificence, will rocket your play through the rafters.
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