Screw the Man

What is required to write every play, of course, differs.  And one of the gifts we can give ourselves, as writers, is to let each process be its own exploration, to let the play "teach us what it wants to be."  Annie Baker's recent HowlRound interview was as smart as I've come to expect (which is to say, "quite,"), but there was one line that sent me flying off on a tangent: "I try to free my students from the notion that there is one way to write to play and they have to conform their impulses and ideas to this conventional watered-down half-Aristotelian half-lame-o Hollywood structure."


I want to be clear, here, that what follows is less a reaction to what Annie said or might have meant than it is a reaction to where I went with it, as I was waking up with my morning run.  But here we go:


Of course, on the one hand, she's absolutely right; there are plenty of playwrights, especially young ones, who have grown up in the world of television and film and so are maybe particularly susceptible to the language and habits of those media, and who we who teach can best serve by opening up to the possibilities of a live medium, to the broad spectrum of possibilities it offers us in terms of rhythm and spectacle and music and language play.  But there's a huge difference between forcing students to "conform their impulses" and empowering them with a sense of history and craft, with helping to equip them with as many tools as possible.  Instinct alone won't make them playwrights.  Reading widely is critical, seeing widely helps even more...but equipping students with a language to articulate what they see, giving them "rules" if only so that they can tell those rules to fuck off...that's important.  Making the mistake of following the rules, and then fighting your way free of them...I'd argue that that's a critical stage in a playwright's development.