Jose Rivera; "The truth of what it is to live now"

JOSE RIVERA - from Playwrights Teach Playwriting

Says the thing he’s seen in graduate students is a lot of fear, a lot of hiding, that people are afraid to show themselves in their plays. His exercises are to get people past that.

He also had what I thought was a pretty succinct and useful definition of the “well-made play,” one I thought could serve a person pretty well in any medium: a character wants something, the character has certain obstacles that keep him or her from getting it, and those obstacles provide the conflict. A play is organized around the character overcoming (or trying to overcome) those obstacles. And as he says, he’s less interested in characters who want something than in characters who would kill for something.

He says he prefers to talk to his students about how to ORGANIZE a play, rather than how to “structure” it. He says he asks student what geometric shape his or her play would be – a pyramid, that starts with one character and keeps adding/expanding out? A circle, that ends where it began? A straight line up? I wonder how many options there are…He also compares a play to a recipe, where you have to set out certain steps in a certain order to reach a certain outcome. So he has a lot of analogies that GET TO structure, without necessarily talking about rising and falling action or act breaks.

TEN ITEMS
1) Give students a list of ten things that must happen in their ten-minute play.
2) Some things you might include, that Hwang includes:
a. The use of a particular word a dozen times.
b. A moment of dance.
c. A page of entirely physical action, with no spoken words.
d. A location like a boat or the top of a building or a mountain.
e. An event like New Year’s Eve.
f. A physical action that takes place like vomiting or head-scratching.
g. A sports metaphor.
h. A dog barking or howling.
i. A discussion of the definition of flight.
j. A reference to a political figure.
k. A joke.
l. Always include one visual element, one musical element, one physical element.

EMILY DICKINSON PLAY
1) “The heart wants what it wants or else it doesn’t care.” – write a short scene based on that.

POSTCARD EXERCISE
1) Bring in a collection of cool postcards.
2) Have each student choose two.
3) Tell them: One postcard is the reality of the world of your play before it begins. The other is reality after your play ends. There’s a postcard in the middle that bridges those realities, but it got lost in the mail. It’s your play. Your job: write the play that gets us from one reality to the other.
4) This is a play about transformation! (See pg 42 in the book)

CLICHÉ EXERCISE
1) Take a few minutes, as a class, to make a list of aphorisms or clichés: “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush,” “a picture is worth 1,000 words,” “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
2) Now write a scene where you make that literal: an apple talking to its tree, a person with a bird in her hand, etc…

Two challenges from Rivera:
1) Don’t be afraid of your worst impulses as a person. There’s some fertile ground for writing there.
2) You’re writing a dialogue with the future, trying to tell them the truth of what it is to live now. Are you doing that? (52).

Margulies (Playwrights Teach Playwriting) EXERCISES!

DONALD MARGULIES

Margulies argues more for teaching structure than any of the other playwrights in the book. He says playwriting “requires a knack for distilling experience into stories” (22). He says that he has his students read a different play every week, and that they then take that play apart in terms of its structure; “we talk about how the plays are built, how stories determine the structure of their telling and not the other way around” (23).

This is an important point. He’s not arguing for an Aristotelian structure, per se – he’s saying that “every story has an inherent structure; your job is to figure out what that structure is and employ it.

Margulies recommends Sweet’s The Dramatists Toolkit, Brande’s Becoming a Writer, and Hayman’s How to Read a Play. Linney recommends McLaughlin’s The Playwrights Progress.

Margulies included a lot of great exercises:

ARBUS EXERCISE (CHARACTER)
1) Give the class a series of photographs by Diane Arbus – or any photos with strange folks, not people they’d know. Curious photographs.
2) Have each student create a list of six or seven questions they’d ask this person – not “when’s your birthday” questions, but “elliptical, non sequitur ones like ‘what was the most puzzling thing about your best friend in third grade’” (25). Or ask who gave them articles of clothing in the picture…etc.
3) Have them then answer the questions in the voice of that character.
4) (EXTENSION) Have each student share his or her photo and share one or two of the responses to questions.
5) Have each student choose two characters and put them in conflict – one wants something the other is unwilling to give.

AUNT DAN AND LEMON EXERCISE (CHARACTER DIFFERENTIATION)
1) In Aunt Dan and Lemon, one of the characters speaks, persuasively, for Nazi/fascist beliefs.
2) Have the students write a monologue where the character is arguing the opposite of something you truly believe. Give that person a voice – and dignity – and a good argument.

TOP GIRLS EXERCISE
1) Include a real historical figure in your play. Not someone off-the-wall; have there be a good reason for your choice, one that feeds back into your play.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (THEME/PLOT)
1) Have each student bring in two articles from that week’s newspaper.
2) Have each student choose two articles they didn’t bring.
3) Have each student write a short play that tells the story of one of the articles.

BETRAYAL SCENE
1) Read the “Torcello” scene.
2) Have students write a two-person scene where Character A manipulates Character B with information but never reveals that information directly.

FIRST DATE PLAY
1) In five scenes or fewer, write a play about your parents’ first date.
2) The scenes don’t have to be the same stylistically, and they don’t have to be told in linear order.

SIX LINES
1) Write a play in six lines. How much story can we get?
2) Read them the next day.

Margulies cautions that students shouldn’t revise and revise and revise a play because, at some point, revision can be come about the avoidance of writing the next play.
He argues for exposure to good theater, above all else, as a way of learning the craft.

Maria Irene Fornes from Playwrights Teach Playwriting – ideas and exercises.

Fornes says she begins each class with thirty to forty-five minutes of yoga.  It’s clear that she sees the basic building block of a production as its actors, that she sees the fundamental building block of a play as character.  She starts her students there.  Her assumption is that “life is interesting, and life doesn’t have an Aristotelian Structure, so why should plays.”  

I don’t know that I agree with that...not that life isn't interesting, but we don't ask people to pay for the privilege of sitting in the dark for two hours without going for the bathroom during the course of normal life -- theater is, as Dietz says, a time-based medium, and while a structure doesn't have to be Aristotelian, the argument "life is interesting" sounds great over a glass of wine, but doesn't get you as far when tickets go from anywhere from fifteen to a hundred and fifty bucks a pop.  If all theater were free, well, that argument might go further with me.

Most of her in-class work with students seems to revolve around generating pages.  Getting them into a very open state with yoga.  Leading them through visualizations of their characters, of the spaces those characters inhabit.  Having them write scenes with those characters at different points in time.

She says she absolutely believes in structure, but that that comes LATER, that so much of a play is about structuring it, and rewriting it.  But in these pages, she really only talks about generating pages.  She doesn’t indicate how, once students have generated pages, she helps them with shaping those pages.  Maybe that's simply harder to talk about?  Or maybe that, for her, is the easier part?  Or the hard part?

PLAYWRIGHTS TEACH PLAYWRITING

I just finished a useful book, edited by Joan Herrington and Crystal Brian.  It’s a compilation of essays by prominent teachers of playwriting, talking about what they do in their classrooms.

It was interesting, to me, to see what people value.  Almost to a one, they deride teaching “structure” or at least the word “structure. They teach people how to get in touch with their inner characters, they teach argument and how to think about politics, they teach…all sorts of things.

To me, the Aristotelian way of looking at things is pretty fundamental.  What does Aristotle talk about?  Beginning, Middle, End.  Character through Action.  Spectacle, Sound, Reversals of Fortune.  You may write a play where you reject these things, but doesn’t it make sense to begin with some of those basic assumptions?  They get you out of a lot of trouble later. 

Maybe it’s that the word “structure” has been so co-opted by the world of film (where it’s treated, often, in a way that’s somewhere between formula and dogma).  Maybe it’s that, as Jose Rivera says, “writers consider themselves rebels…They think structure is for people with no imagination” (49).  Maybe I escaped that working with Dietz, who is the first to tell you that he’s the son of a railway man, and thus obsessed by time and structure – or at least inclined to give them full shrift.

But we teach what we value, right?  Or do we teach what’s easiest for us to teach?  Or what’s hardest for us, as writers to do?  It’s an interesting question: why do decide to teach what you do to your students?  What is your overall objective for them?  What do you consider it crucial that they learn how to do?  Every classroom is, for better or worse, a living manifesto.