I’m teaching a class in playwriting this semester and yesterday I introduced my students to David Ball’s definition of action. This is from his book Backwards & Forwards: “Action occurs when something happens that makes or permits something else to happen.” Each action in a play, in other words, is made up of two events–I say “Good morning;” you say “To you, too.” If I have understood Ball correctly, the advantage in understanding theatrical action this way is that it forces you to examine how a play moves from action to action, from beginning to end, in terms of the negotiations that take place between and among the characters on stage. In theater, as in life, in other words, no event exists in the absence of a context, and that context is not merely, and not even primarily, social and cultural; that context is made up of what the people around you do both in response to and as catalysts of what you do. This is true in novels and short stories as well, of course, as in non-fiction narrative forms; the difference is that writing a play limits you to what actually gets said on stage. Understanding both how a play moves from one action to another and the interior structure of each action, as well as its relationship to all the other actions in the play, is thus crucial if a play you are writing is going to cohere. In actual practice, of course, different playwrights will deal with the question of action differently and so my point in introducing this concept to my students was less about giving them a writing technique than it was about getting them to explore, in their own imaginations, the differences between playwriting and the other kinds of creative writing they have done.
To highlight this difference, I gave them a paragraph I’d written for an essay–one of the Fragments of Evolving Manhood, in fact–and I asked them to list the actions contained within it. Here is the paragraph:
A colleague with whom I used to have lunch on a regular basis would occasionally bring her three-year-old son along. Usually, Daniel was a very animated little boy, asking questions, making a mess, and doing in general what three-year-old boys do to maintain themselves as the focus of attention. On this particular afternoon, however, Daniel sat next to his mother in complete silence. Both his hands were bandaged because of a fall he’d taken earlier in the day, and he was still in pain, making it difficult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut from the pizza we’d ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frustration on her son’s face became especially acute, my friend would stop our conversation, pick up a small square of food, and hold it to his mouth, not continuing with what she’d been saying until he chewed and swallowed the whole thing. When we were done, and Daniel stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently asking for comfort. My friend squatted in front of her son and asked, “What’s the matter, Daniel? Does it hurt?” When Daniel nodded his head, she stroked his cheek with a finger and said, “I know, sweetie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” Daniel set his three-year-old mouth in a firm, thin line, and nodded his head again. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up, and motioned to me that they were ready to leave.
One of the things you might notice about the actions in this paragraph is that they aren’t always told in sequential order. Take, for example, this sentence: “Both [Daniel’s] hands were bandaged because of a fall he’d taken earlier in the day, and he was still in pain, making it difficult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut from the pizza we’d ordered for lunch.” One of the things I pointed out to my students, for example, is that, in terms of the sentence structure, the mother cuts the pizza after Daniel has difficulty holding the pieces she has cut. On stage, obviously, that order would have to be reversed in order for it to make sense.
Anyway, after we went through this paragraph in class, I gave my students a homework assignment in which they had to tell in prose a story from their lives that they felt was particularly dramatic. I asked them to list the actions in the story, and I asked them as well to write a little bit about why they felt this story might make a good play. What did they learn from the story? What, if it were made into a play, did they think an audience would take away from it? Since I often do the exercises I give to students in my creative writing classes, I sat down the other night to do this one, and my mind immediately went to several incidents that took place between my brother and me when we were teenagers. In each case, my brother betrayed me in very serious ways and, taken collectively, these incidents constituted a turning point in my life, not simply in my relationship with my brother, but also because it is possible to draw a direct line between some of those incidents and choices I made that resulted in my becoming the person I am today.
My brother has been dead for a very long time and so nothing is stopping me from telling those tales. There’s no one to embarrass, and it is long past the time when anyone would be worried about my brother’s honor. The stories themselves, however, are not what motivated me to write this post. Rather, what struck me was how hard it was as I wrote those stories out to tell them in a way that did justice to my brother as a three dimensional character. No matter how I told them–and I tried a couple of different ways–he always came out the villain and I always came out the long-suffering and even a little bit martyred older brother. On some level, in other words, writing those stories was a way for me to settle a score with my brother–a very convenient way, since he is not here to give his side of the story–and I know from experience that writing out of the impulse for revenge rarely, if ever, results in a work of art.
I ended up using a different story the exercise I gave my students, but trying to write about my brother has gotten me thinking again about family politics, specifically between siblings, and how when sibling rivalry is so strong that it dominates the relationship between and among brothers and sisters, in whatever combination they exist, there are almost always only angels and devils, those who are absolutely in the right and those who are absolutely in the wrong, and neither side is usually willing to acknowledge that things are never that simple. It was like that for me and my brother until just before he was killed in a drunk driving accident around thirty years ago; and while I cherish the all too brief moments before his death when we seemed to be moving towards reconciliation, I wish our relationship had, as a whole, been other than it was, because I wish my memories of him were not primarily of us being at each other’s throats. After all, the issues we were fighting about, while they were hurtful at the time should in the long run have been far less important than the one fact about us that nothing can never change: we were brothers.
Cross-posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry.
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