Perhaps the biggest roadblock to musical theatre writing is that scripts require many separate skills that hardly ever reside in the same person.  They are usually written in teams—book writer (script writer), lyricist, and composer.  Whereas most playwrights would be perfectly happy writing the script—and, possibly, the lyrics—it is unusual that they would have the musical expertise to write all those darned notes.  Musical theatre writing then would best be taught as an interdisciplinary endeavor—music and creative writing—possibly with students taking different roles within the class.  While I believe that such team-taught courses exist in larger universities, I doubt that the average college would have the resources.  What to do then at a smaller school when faced with a musically-inclined student?

From a practical point of view, I do a few things.  First, I lay out the realities:  I am not qualified to teach music theory, but can help with words.  I make sure that the student knows that musicals are extremely time-consuming and usually written in teams.  Second, I urge students to become acquainted with musical theatre literature—especially the integrated book musical, as exemplified by Rodgers and Hammerstein, one of the U.S.A.’s most significant contributions to drama.  I also make a few general statements regarding musical numbers.  I discuss basic formatting:  song lyrics are written as verse, with line breaks, and in all caps.  I describe how songs are used in the integrated book musical:  the action of the play does not stop for the song; rather, the song comes at the height of drama.  An old adage states that what cannot be said in words must be said in song; and what cannot be said in song must be said in dance.  Songs, then, are for intense moments—climaxes and decisions.  Last, I suggest that the student have a melody in mind while writing lyrics:  the melody does not have to be good, but it will allow the student a stronger sense of structure as the lines are written.

Usually, with just these bits of advice, students can make forays into musical theatre writing.  Later, more advanced students continue in independent studies with me or with faculty from the Music Department.  Most important, though, is acknowledging that budding musical writers should be encouraged, not discouraged.

As teachers of playwriting, we must realize that we and our students are part of a community of artists.  Whereas writers in other forms—poetry, for example—can imagine that they operate exclusively in a world of writers, playwrights have no such luxury.  Their work depends on a vast network of artists – actors, designers, stage hands, etc. – who are not primarily literary.  Whereas the decision makers for the printed genres (for example, editors of creative writing journals) can be presumed to have a literary background, decision makers for theatre (for example, artistic directors of professional theatres) may have found their way to the profession through any number of fields unrelated to writing.  For this reason, they do not always see playwriting as important.  It is up to us, then, to insist that it is.

Scott Walters points out that popular music does not rely on covers of past hits, nor does the motion picture industry confine itself to remakes.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that our most vibrant contemporary art forms—popular music, stand-up comedy, video, and, to a lesser degree, movies—are predicated on originality.  Of the arts, only classical music shares theatre’s obsession with re-creating works of the past.  In contrast, visual artists must create afresh, and poetry and fiction become mere book-making without original contributions from today’s writers.  Puzzlingly, theatre is an unwitting oddball in its preference for works of the past.

What we have today is a karaoke theatre, where contemporary artists recreate yesterday’s hits.  While karaoke is entertaining, no one thinks of it as high art because it lacks the ability to further the field.  No one looks to karaoke singers to define what art and culture will become.    Regrettably, theatre today is largely karaoke theatre and satisfied to remain that way.  It excludes the contributions of today’s writers; paradoxically, amending this exclusion could be the solution to many of contemporary theatre’s problems.

Playwriting teachers must be aware of the issues facing the theatre community and must be prepared to make cases like I have made.  If teachers do not advocate for playwriting, there will be no need for the playwrights that we train.

Besides screenwriting, the internet has enhanced the practicality of another field—radio drama.  The format, which dwindled in the U.S. with the rise of television, is now reemerging under the aegis of podcasting and audiobooks.  Teachers of dramatic writing are wise to embrace audio theatre for the following reasons:

1. It stands to become more and more important in our Internet Age.
2. It provides easy production opportunities for emerging writers—requiring no sets, costumes, or even line memorization, as required by film and the stage.
3. Digital recordings, the product of audio theatre endeavors, are easy to disseminate to a wide audience.

My university, Arkansas Tech, has been leading the way in audio theatre ventures for seven years now.  Through an organization called the Arkansas Radio Theatre, we have created more than forty broadcasts which play on the local radio station, are made available to the visually impaired throughout the state, and are available on-line  (click Public, then Radio Theatre).  The Arkansas Radio Theatre is dedicated to new plays and adaptations of classic literature.  An audio theatre company like the Arkansas Radio Theatre is easy to establish because free recording software is easily available.  An interested instructor simply needs some microphones in order to record voices.  Apart from that, an audio theatre company simply requires a means for broadcast—or some server space, which is readily available at most universities.

However, just because a production opportunity exists, that does not mean that student writers are prepared to take advantage of it.  Because audio theatre is a unique form, writers must be trained with relevant coursework.  In order to build the Radio Theatre into the curricular structures of my university, I am teaching (in Fall 2014) an upper-division topics course focusing on Radio Theatre Writing.  Some of the assignments explore audio theatre as a genre:  for example, listening to broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio and comparing them to the audio drama available today.  Students will eventually work toward hour-long original scripts.  Hopefully, the insights learned in teaching this class will help others who attempt to engage in audio theatre projects.  I will report on the progress of the course in later posts.

Frequently, I encounter in beginning playwrights a lack of attention to punctuation.  Perhaps they believe that, because punctuation is for the eye, it is unnecessary to writing that addresses itself to the ear.  However, such a belief ignores punctuation’s significance as a means of suggesting vocal techniques of expression—specifically, the pause—which are readily understood to the listener but hard to convey to the reader.  Because punctuation captures the rhythms of spoken speech, it’s essential that playwrights employ punctuation to its fullest potential.

While everyone is familiar with basic punctuation marks—such as the period, comma, exclamation point, etc.—there are others that beginning playwrights tend to neglect.  Here are some of my favorites.  (Similar lists can be found in textbooks such as Buzz McLaughlin’s The Playwright’s Process.)

1. The ellipsis (. . .) indicates a trailing off, whether within or at the end of a speech.  It suggests confusion or a wandering of the mind, rather than an abrupt change of thought.
2. The dash (—) indicates an interruption, whether within or at the end of a speech.  Characters interrupt themselves as their thoughts change in quick succession or as they make hasty additions to their statements.  Dashes are used, also, when characters are interrupted by other characters.
3. The semicolon (;) links related thoughts.
4. The colon (:) links related thoughts more closely than the semi-colon.  The colon is used for assertions that hinge on one another, suggesting a stronger—perhaps causal—relationship.
5. The question mark followed by the uncapitalized question—e.g., “What do you think I am? a dog?”  This form suggests a subsidiary question that continues the first, rather than a wholly new question asked in succession.  This punctuation device can greatly affect an actor’s inflection.

Consider working with punctuation in class.  For instance, you might have students come up with sample lines of dialogue in which they use these conventions.  Such exercises can help encourage greater precision in writing.

To commit speeches to paper, dramatic writers should take advantage of all devices at

their disposal—including italics, all caps, and the formatting of text as verse.  After all, playwrights have the difficult task of converting a complex medium (the spoken word) to another medium (the written word) and of doing so in such a way as to suggest delivery to actors.

How do you teach punctuation in the scriptwriting classroom?  How do you discuss micro-concerns like the line, as opposed to larger concerns like plotting or character building?

Given the importance of local theatre, one would think that such performance would be thriving — unfortunately, it is not. This is especially true for local playwriting. Because local theatres have no obligation to present new, local work, they typically turn to renditions of familiar plays that audiences have seen before. While productions of such plays may be comfortable for audiences and for the theatre makers involved, they create minimal opportunities for local dramatists. Though most regions of the country — even far-out, rural places — have some local theatre, they do not often have local dramatic writing. Such a situation hurts local writers and theatre as a whole by inhibiting regional diversity in a form that, of necessity, must be regional.

For this reason, playwriting instructors must not only be writers, but also theatre artists. Specifically, they must act as producers, arranging shows and making them occur. It is not enough to ask students to stuff their plays into envelopes, send them to faraway theatres, and hope for the best: instead, the instructor must ensure local performance opportunities. Print publication is unlikely for beginning dramatists. Because of the pre-eminence of live production, playwrights have far fewer opportunities for print publication than do poets and other writers. Production at distant theatres is similarly unlikely. Most theatres that produce new work already have relationships with playwrights-in-residence and are unlikely to assist beginning authors who live far away. These theatres tend to prefer local writers because proximity makes for an easier working relationship. Instructors can collaborate with existing local theatre companies; but, most often, the instructor will have to run his or her own “production company” — whether it’s something as simple as a series of public readings or as innovative as a podcast/videocast theatre.

Plays must be performed — there is no other medium for them — and, like it or not, the playwriting instructor must be on the front lines of performance.

How do you incorporate performance/production in the playwriting classroom?

The Poetics, thankfully, is a short book.  But it’s also very obtuse.  I ask the students to approach it “scripturally.”  By comparing the Poetics to holy writ, I suggest that it deserves constant study and re-reading.  Also, much can be skimmed—for example, discussions of specific Greek word choice or authors no longer extant.  These sections can be treated like the genealogies and census reports in the Hebrew scriptures—skimmed over without worry. This comparison works extremely well in Bible Belt Arkansas, where I teach, though it would likely work elsewhere.

The Poetics is filled with valuable lessons.  I usually focus on one Aristotelian insight in particular:  his six dramatic elements, I find, are especially useful for teaching different dramatic approaches.  Aristotle divided drama into six components, often translated as Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Song, and Spectacle.  While Aristotle prioritizes Plot above all else, he sees these elements as necessary cogs in the mechanics of scriptwriting.  I use the elements, not to suggest commonalities among plays, but rather to show how different authors use different approaches. 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, most playwriting pedagogy privileges realism (Sam Smiley’s Playwriting: The Structure of Action is a notable exception).  Put in Aristotelian terms, books and teachers tend to prioritize Character over all else.  While some instructors might insist that the elements are inseparable and, therefore, of similar importance, they nonetheless belie their arguments by, for example, giving Plot the limiting definition of Character’s objective in action or whittling Thought down to simply “what the characters want.”  While Plot and Thought can be viewed as subordinate to Character, they don’t have to be.

A study of literature in an Aristotelian light reveals that different playwrights prioritize different elements.  For example, a spectator might well guess that Tennessee Williams generated his plots only after detailed character work; or that Agatha Christie plotted her mysteries first, starting with functional agents only later to expand them into true characters.   Likewise, Bernard Shaw almost certainly started with Thought and then developed his plots and characters to bring ideas to life.  Even the three undervalued elements—Diction, Song, and Spectacle—can be starting points for artists, with Diction leading to Gertrude Stein-esque language plays, Spectacle leading to circus acts or dances, and Song to opera or musical comedy.

By highlighting how different playwrights prioritize the Aristotelian elements, an instructor can acknowledge the diversity of playwriting approaches without forcing beginning authors into character-based realism.  Do you use Aristotle in the playwriting classroom?  If so, how?  In which ways do you teach differing approaches to generating plays?

What’s more, wasteful writing can mean not just a waste of monetary resources, but a waste of performer time.  To return to the waiter example, a playwright in a university setting could likely find a fellow student willing to play a minor role without compensation—meaning that the inclusion of a peripheral character would not increase expense in this case.  However, I ask writers to also take into account the performer’s perspective.  While student actors might be willing to play small roles, the truth is that no one wants to sit through weeks of rehearsal for a part that ultimately isn’t all that meaningful. A small part is one thing, a small and wholly insignificant part is quite another.  Therefore, ethically, the playwright should cut the role or make it worthwhile; otherwise, she or he is wasting someone’s (unpaid) time.

Material realities have even greater significance when they illuminate larger issues of artistic representation.  Cultural prejudices, for example, exist everywhere; but it is easier to see their consequences in the dramatic arts.  As I remind students, acting is one of the only jobs where employers can legally include sex, age, and race as hiring considerations—even though these categories are subject to legal protections elsewhere.  Because scripts create work for actors, I remind my students that, with each role that they write, they are potentially creating or denying work for another human being—and often doing so along race-based, sex-based, and age-based lines.  In other words, since each role potentially puts food on someone’s table, playwrights must not ignore their responsibilities to society. If the roles they create put food only on the tables of young white males, I encourage them to at least be aware of the exclusions they’re building into their creative work.

Just as the stage concretizes the text, so the field of dramatic writing concretizes the problems of representation that all creative writers face (or should be facing).  In playwriting, it is harder to ignore one’s ethical responsibilities because they are so apparent.  A print-based writer knows in theory that she or he should not create characters that conform to offensive stereotypes.  The playwright, however, must understand that, when she or he creates such a role, she or he must essentially look another human being in the eye and say, “You.  Be that.”

In class, I use a sequence of out-loud group storytelling exercises. By emphasizing quickness and collaboration, these exercises urge students to see plot as a skill to be practiced, rather than as a unique art object to be labored over. By working quickly, students learn that plot can be generated without unnecessary headaches. And by attending carefully to what comes before and trying to adapt to the developing plot, students work toward what Aristotle would call a “unity of action.”

Here’s how the exercises work:

• STEP ONE. The class tells a story one word at a time, going around the room two or three times. This step serves largely as a warm-up, but it also demonstrates that plot balances individuality and utility — sometimes a student is lucky enough to get a noun or verb; other times, an article or preposition is required. This step can be repeated until students are comfortable.

• STEP TWO. The class tells a story with each student saying five words at a time. After a few runs, you should urge the class to build the story to a logical end. You can encourage a stronger ending by identifying the last student in advance and telling him or her that his or her last two words must be “The End.”

• STEP THREE. Five members of the class sit in chairs at the front of the room and tell a story in twenty-second increments. Give each chair a label, such as “set-up,” “inciting incident,” “escalating conflict,” “climax,” and “dénouement.” After the students understand their functions, they tell a story. I count aloud quietly for each student’s twenty-second turn. After the first story, students can switch positions to try new functions; they should repeat the exercise until some measure of success is achieved.

Interspersed with the individual stories, you can make comments and lead brief discussions. For example, early on, the story often “de-rails.” You can ask the class why this happened and how the story might be fixed. You can also make minimal side comments while the exercise is in progress, such as, “Just say anything,” or “Let’s bring the story to an end.”

These exercises help to demystify dramatic structure and give students experience using their “plotting muscles.” Of course, this series works best in a class where students are comfortable with each other and feel free to express themselves. It is ideal if some exercises in improvisation have occurred earlier in the semester.

How do you teach plot in the classroom?

While realistic drama has its place in the classroom, I question the notion that realism must come first.  Such a premise denies the primary reason dramatists write:  not to recreate life—which can be watched as it unfolds in any laundromat or public place—but rather to tell a story aloud.

Playwriting is best understood as a logical step in oral storytelling:  first, describe an incident; then, add dialogue to that description; next, recite the dialogue with appropriate attitude (acting); and, finally—when the story overwhelms the capacity of the solo teller—ask friends to join in and take on roles (drama).  Nothing in this process suggests the necessity of any imitation of life with its nitty-gritty details.  Furthermore, theatre history tells us that drama did not begin with what we would call realism; so why begin with it in the classroom?  Certainly, many of drama’s most lasting successes—the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, for instance—are not realistic and are nothing like words overheard in a café.

Realism gets promoted because it is comfortable and familiar.  But, if we cling to it too strongly, we neglect some of the advantages of the dramatic form:  we favor interior psychology over external activities such as the machinations of storyline or the simple performing of actions on a stage.  If we neglect external activities, what Aristotle would call plot and spectacle, we miss out on opportunities to connect with our viewing audiences. Instead, the wise dramatist turns to activity:  plot, a tried and true device to hold audience interest; and spectacle, the trappings of performance that delight.  These elements, arguably playwriting’s most glittering advantages, are in no way bound up in the realm of realism.  Playwriting’s history, its underlying impulse, and its potential for distinction among the other creative writing genres all point toward non-realistic styles.

Still, I would never entirely ban realism from the classroom.  In truth, the vast majority of my students choose to write realistic scenes.  But I apply to teaching the ideas that students deserve the right to choose their styles and that realism need not be zealously promoted.

Do you find yourself encouraging or discouraging realism in your teaching?

Because “theatricality” is inconceivable apart from action—apart from the act of doing that constitutes performance—the teaching of playwriting requires performance as part of classroom activities. The concept of performance as pre-eminent should undergird all course structures. For example, when possible, written assignments should be shared aloud in class: hearing texts with an audience is preferable to at-home silent reading because the former better approximates how scripts are meant to be experienced.

Dramatic writers must learn to see themselves as performers. They do not need to be good performers, but they need to be willing. They need to be able to play roles well enough that they can hear in their minds the characters’ voices as they commit words to paper. It is not the same skill as that of the actor, who hears primarily one voice at a time, but is more like that of the stage director who understands the interplay of multiple voices. Most playwrights, I believe, mutter to themselves. And, while a little murmuring is probably common to all creative writers, I would guess that playwrights spend an inordinate amount of time muttering speeches and singing songs to themselves. This skill—necessary as a “trying out” of characters—can be nurtured in students by having them perform.

To teach theatricality at its most basic, I suggest “The Play without Words” exercise, which I do with beginning playwrights at the start of each semester. For this exercise, students write a one-page play with a plot, in which no one speaks. Students must convey that plot through performance, using only materials readily available—the classroom, items from home, and three random classmates. This challenging exercise goes a long way toward illuminating both the limitations and benefits of the stage.  Students typically try to do too much:  for example, one young woman once tried to show a couple saying their last loving good-byes before they jumped from a collapsing World Trade Center. While interesting, the premise is inscrutable without additional trappings—words or set—as explanation.  On the other hand, students have learned how marvelously engaging it is to have a swordfight or an actor pretending to be an animal:  these actions seem hokey on the page, but are magic in performance. By having students perform early on, they internalize the “theatricality” that separates playwriting from the other genres, thereby laying the groundwork to become better dramatists.

How do you get student writers to incorporate theatricality in their dramatic works? How much does performance figure into your teaching? What are your favorite classroom exercises?