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).