What is a subplot anyway?

I'm working on a new play and I'm considering including a sub-plot. Except I don't know what a sub plot is.

Having never tried to implement one, I've though of a sub-plot as some sort of secondary storyline that somehow parallels or comments on the main plot. But as I've started conceiving the structure of my newest play, I'm finding that definition doesn't help me in practice.

I apologize for the obtuseness that's about to follow, but because the new play is being targeted at a specific theater, I don't want to get into public details at this time.

So - I have a protagonist, and I've articulated his main goal for myself. I've set up a likely antagonist who provides an obstacle to that goal. And then I realized I had left a character out of this central push-pull. This third character causes the death of the protagonist's father, and is central to a major theme of the play.

My carefully constructed framework began to crumble before my very eyes. If I included this third character in the antag/protag conflict, I would water down my central dramatic question. But I don't want to give up this third character and his themes!

So I thought: subplot.

I'm focusing now on the "plot" in subplot. Rather than being a secondary consideration of the protagonist, the subplot will have its own sub-antagonist and sub-protagonist. There will be points of intersection where the plots complicate each other, and a catastrophic intersection (the death of the main-protag's father).

I think the play will look something like this:



Notice I'm thinking here of plot as generated by the push-pull of the protag/antag pair.

My attempt at sub-plot raises further questions for me. What's the difference between a plot/subplot structure and a multi-plot structure like Crash or Arcadia? What's the difference between plot/subplot and a structure where there are secondary protagonist concerns? For example, pick any action movie where the hero has to save the world and also is marriage is falling apart.

I think I'm going to re-read King Lear and look at that plot structure. How are other (living!) writers working on subplots?

Read More......

Why is TV Better than Theater?

John From Cincinnati pulled off the one of the most unique scenes I've seen on stage or screen in last Sunday's episode. You can read the text here.

The scene and the speech is probably generating a lot of discussion by fans of the show --I'm not sure I count myself as one yet. But that discussion is going to be about what the speech means within the confines of the world Milch et al are creating. The question that leaps to mind for me is: why isn't theater doing anything this interesting or this confounding?

Sure - there's plenty of the self-appointed vanguard out there doing opaque work. But my exposure to that world has always included a feeling of "Well, if you don't get it, fuck you." The thing that confounds me about John From Cincinnati is how generous it is as it completely runs itself off the rails. Somewhere, somehow, Milch and company are saying "It's OK if you don't get it right now. Hang in there, come along for the ride."

Part of that is in the way they've built John's character. We've been taught in steps that he parrots words and that he rearranges those found phrases for his own meaning. Structurally, we've been prepared to hear and listen to John's speech. We've been taught the rules of John's behavior over the last four episodes and now the writers have taken those rules and built something suprising and unique.

So perhaps that's one structural lesson to take from the last episode: teach the rules of the world, riff on the rules of the world. In the shows of the self-appointed vanguardists, its often step one that's missing.

But what else is this show doing structurally to make it OK to be completely confounded?

Read More......

Transitions

Lights fade. Blackout. Crossfade. Are these the only tools the playwright has to control the transitions between scenes?

I am obsessed with scene transitions. I can't tell you the number of live theater experiences I've had that have been tarnished by poor scene transitions. If hedge funds exist to exploit market inefficiencies, then I'm the hedge fund manager of scene transitions. Is that a tortured comparison? You bet it is. But its very awfulness should at least lodge this in your memory: we are losing valuable time to communicate meaning to our audience through inefficient scene transitions.

A well-executed professional production will at least minimize the time between scenes. In a large stage with multiple playing areas, the transition is often an eye-blink. But I believe that the way we move from one scene to another helps create meaning, and we're not using that to its fullest potential.

The problem, I think, lies in the very conventions of presenting plays on the page. Too often we simply write:

HECTOR

I can't believe you said that in front of Sandra!

(Hector exits)

SCENE THREE

(Lights rise on...)

And we have faith that a director and design team is going to handle that white space between Hector's exit and the top of scene three.

I fully support theater as a collaborative art. But I think that too often we playwrights are looking for our collaborators to solve problems we should be solving. In a traditional production - and by traditional in this context I mean one where a playwright has written a play independently, and a theater has chosen it for production - the play document itself is the nexus of collaboration. We are not doing our job as collaborative partners if we don't suggest clear visions for all aspects of the play, including scene transitions.

So how do we go about that? By developing a more expressive scene transition language. Keep experimenting with ways to communicate your vision. For example, in my play First Words, I envisioned seamless act breaks. Here I pick up near the end of the first scene:

DIANE begins to create a space around her. She walks to a desk. She places testing materials on her desk: a stand-up binder, a collection of sponge pieces. A stopwatch.

DIANE (CONT’D)

The government, the county, the schools have an obligation to serve each child to the best of our ability. And in order to best serve each child, we must determine exactly what that child needs. DIANE walks away from the desk, towards the audience.

That’s my job. That’s what I do.
(beat)
What I should have done.

Behind DIANE, PAUL, BARBARA and AIDEN enter the desk area.

SCENE 2

Continuous.

PAUL

What do you mean no “significant improvement.”

BARBARA

Paul, please.

Not a quantum leap, I suppose. But detailing the movement I see and borrowing the convention of Continuous from film, I think I've created a more solid framework for collaboration.

What other techniques are people using to detail scene transitions?

Read More......

Punctuated Equilibrium

Tracy Letts' August: Osage County has me questioning some of my basic assumptions about story structure.

Osage County is just about three and a half hours long, including two intermissions. And while I personally didn't experience the transcendent "it felt like no time at all" that some audience members have claimed, it was all in all an engaging time in the theater.

There are some production questions I would raise in another forum, but I'm trying to stay on the right side of my self-imposed rules against reviews. What interests me here is the structure of the story.

Despite the dominance of the matriarch of the family, I would say there is no true protagonist. Likewise there is no single dominant story arc, no central spine of action. True, all the action is set into motion by the family returns to the homestead - so it is sent in motion by a single action. But unlike protagonist driven work, each of the subsequent choices do not link together in a chain of causal action.

Normally, I would find these kind of story structure to be flat, meandering. But somehow, Osage County remains engaging.

One of the tactics I see is what I'm calling "Punctuated Equilibrium," to borrow poorly from evolutionary theories. Each of the characters in Osage county are locked in some sort of stasis. Throughout the course of the play, each of those characters takes a stand or makes a choice - and the stasis is broken. This periodic punctuation definitely keeps us engaged. But these choices are not chained together - in some cases they operate almost independently. As a result, instead of story structure that looks like this:



We have a story structure that looks more like this:



There seem to be a fair number of some people call "ensemble plays." I've heard ensemble plays defined as a work were the characters act as a collective protagonist. But I've not really been satisfied with that definition. Could punctuated equilibrium be a valid way to look at ensemble story structure?

Read More......

Paralogue

I've discovered a new species of short play: the paralogue.

We recognize a short play that has a dialog structure. Two or more characters talking, each having roughly the same amount of "air time." And of course there is the monologue - be it direct address, poetic, or the interior mental landscape of the character.

But lately I've noticed more and more paralogues. A paralogue is a scene with two (or more) characters, in which one character overwhelmingly dominates the scene. A recent example is Stephen Cone's "We Came Here Because It's Beautiful" present at Collaboraction's Sketchbook.

In Chris Jones' review, he suggests that the pieces juxtaposes an "erotically forward old woman with a nervous new bride." I find that an interesting take: the piece was so dominated by the old woman that I'm not sure it rises to juxtaposition.

Don't get me wrong: I absolutely loved Cone's piece. I'm just wondering what's happening here structurally. In longer works, I tend to view the Character Interuptus as a cheat to disguise a monologue. Character A holds forth while Character Interuptus occasionally interjects to give the illusion of a conversation.

But somehow the same situation seems less artificial in a shorter format. In the paralogue, the domination of one character seems less a trick and more a function of the relationship. What's more, it seems a function of the dramatic structure of the piece. I just can't quite put my finger on what the mechanics are.

Perhaps one way to ask the question is this: in a paralogue, what is it that prevents us from simply cutting the other character and running the scene as a direct address monologue?

Read More......