Stealing from Other Art Forms

One of the things I hear, again and again, from more seasoned artists, is to make time to explore/learn from/appreciate other art forms.  Lisa D'Amour brought it up in the workshop I did with her, Suzan Zeder and Daniel Alexander Jones talked about it, and I remember being so struck, at Steven Dietz's house, by how much of his bookshelf space was given over to music and the study of music.

I'm prepared for it to seem weird that I'm posting this here, on my playwriting blog, but one of those websites on which I obsessively spend time (yes, more than Howlround or 2amT) is called Houzz.com -- and it's all about home design.

Background: I think I was seven when I asked for my first magazine subscription...and it was to Architectural digest.  I started arguing with my parents about how we decorated our house by the time I was ten, I've moved over 20 times since I was sixteen (for those who are counting, that averages about once every nine months), and I've collected and cast off more furniture than I can recollect.  I've built tables by hand only to give them away, scattered my grandmothers' antiques from here to California (but I know whether they are -- and I'm going back for them), rolled couches down dozens of city blocks, painted and repainted and repainted...suffice to say, the idea of "home" for me is fraught (and frequently shows up in my playwriting), and I'm someone who cares -- a lot -- about the aesthetics of a space.  Which isn't to say my apartments have looked great -- because I've never committed to a space, and thus have always seen everything it contains (myself included) as "temporary."  So.  Modern Nomad.

Houzz is a place where I can live vicariously, where I can collect and store a huge number of images for "someday."

And sometimes it occurs to me that there might be a connection between the art form I practice, and my extracurricular obsession.  Check this article, for example.

Note the principles this landscape architect talks about using to communicate abundance:

Color
Views
Timelessness
Layers
Intimacy
Focal Points
Movement
Ornamentation
Spontaneity
Pattern

The minute I saw that list, I thought "Viewpoints" and "Aristotle's Poetics."

I think every one of the principles Jeffrey Gordon Smith talks about here has an application on stage -- and, by extension, in playwriting.  I think that if we look at our scripts and ask whether we've created room for Color (diversity, yes, and also vibrancy), Views (perspective), whether we've created layers of meaning, whether we've created an experience with focal points (what Dietz called "stop moments") and intimacy between the people on stage and for our audience, whether our play moves, whether it has ornamentation (perhaps what Aristotle referred to as "spectacle"), spontaneity (what all actors work for, I think, and something that's huge in Viewpoints training) and Pattern (call it story (Dietz), call it Harmony (if you're Aristotle).

Anyway.  Another interesting set of questions to ask of your plays, when you're looking at a draft.