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.
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