Tag Archives: Theatre

September 14, 2011 · 08:33

The Play’s the Thing

I earned my bachelor’s in Theatre Arts and I’m not sorry. As a writer, I still use what I learned in acting, criticism, and theater history. Playwrights and actors, like writers, are storytellers at heart, and books, screenplays and stage plays all share similarities. But the best thing about spending years during and after college immersed in theater is that I learned how to talk.

Yes, I could speak before I started college. But plays depend on the spoken word for every aspect of the story: character development; setting up Goal, Motivation and Conflict; description; and back story. Most actions on a stage are rooted in the dialogue between characters. (The italicized stage directions are, in most cases, notes taken by the stage manager of the play’s original production.)

Each character in a play has his or her own voice, made up of vocabulary, speech patterns, and slang; influences include but aren’t limited to education, economic status, occupation, gender and historical era. Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire speaks differently not only from Stanley Kowalski, her brother-in-law, but from Stanley’s wife Stella, who is her sister. In Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, three actors play the same character at different stages in her life. You will think, and thus speak, differently at 90 than you do at 52, or than you did at 26, as Albee’s dialogue for A, B, and C makes clear.

Whether it’s on the stage or the page, dialogue shows how a character thinks or how they respond to other characters. If a conversation or a line of dialogue — especially interior dialogue, a luxury playwrights don’t have — doesn’t convey something about the characters or advance the plot, cut it. Tight writing keeps the reader engaged in the story and turning the page.

And the spoken word has a rhythm all its own. Listen to the people around you next time you’re standing in line. We repeat each others’ words, emphasize points by slowing our speech down, and convey ideas with a brief phrase.  We use slang from our workplaces or ethnic backgrounds. Even geography affects dialogue. A New Yorker is likelier to start a conversation by stating what he or she wants right away, as opposed to someone from the American South, where even business conversations begin with “How are you doing today?”

The best playwrights of every nationality and era capture the language they hear (or heard) around them. The vitality of Elizabethan English lives on in Shakespeare’s plays, as do the drawls and flutterings of the mid-20th century American South in the those of Tennessee Williams. English plays one of my most valuable resources for grasping the syntax and slang of both the nobility and commoners through the centuries.

If you’d rather rent a movie of a play, that’s great! Although film is much more visual than stage plays are, many are a good introduction to dramatic dialogue and characterization. Plays were meant to be seen and heard. I haven’t tried looking on Netflix to see if any of my favorites can be streamed, but there are a lot of DVDs of plays out there. Some library systems have good collections. Or best of all, support your local community theater! Go see a play!!

If you could pick any play,stage or movie version, to see today, what would it be? Shakespeare wrote my all favorite body of work, but my all time favorite play is Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Related articles

Leave a Comment

Filed under Character development, Dialogue, Theater, Writers, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

January 25, 2011 · 15:55

Speak the Speech, I pray You

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you—trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines…use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”  — Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

I studied a lot of drama in college, and later used what I had learned in several community theater productions.  I’m lucky to live in a good ‘theatre’ town, with several non-profit companies that cover everything from Euripides to musicals to original works.  Although the acting bug stopped biting me awhile ago, I loved nearly every moment of rehearsal and performance, not least because I had the chance to appear in some wonderful productions.

Plays differ from movies in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest contrasts is, as one of my favorite directors used to say, “Movies move, plays talk.”  Film, based on photography, depends on images to tell a story. Theater, defined by the presence of actors and audience in the same space at the same time, depends on dialogue.

While I write books, not plays, and have an array of writing devices to use in story-telling, I still love good verbal interplay between characters. Whether as a writer or a reader, I demand a lot of a character’s speech (and since narrative can go inside someone’s head, their thoughts).

A character’s vocabulary and grammar can inform the reader of his or her background, social or educational level, and relationship with other people in the room in the space of a few words. Our speech is influenced by our gender, our mood at the moment, and our basic natures.  So is a believable fictional character’s.

One of my favorite series is the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries by Anne Perry.  Thomas, although the son of a gamekeeper, speaks like a member of the upper class. This works because Perry explains that as a boy, he was permitted to share lessons with the son of his father’s employer. That’s only one example. A cowboy from Texas won’t have the same accent or slang as a Boston-raised lawyer, even if they both went to Harvard.

Suppose a character alters her accent to fit into her current workplace or social circle.  She may still use expressions she learned in childhood, like Eliza Doolittle at tea with Mrs. Higgins in My Fair Lady — or my old acting professor. Bill is a New Orleans native who needed to tame his accent in order to increase the range of roles he could get. It always cracked us up when he would say, with perfect standard pronunciation, “I am fixing to go down to the store. Do you all want something?”

One of the biggest aspects of a character’s speech and thought is gender.  Men aren’t as verbal as woman, and unless it’s in an area they are trained to observe, they often don’t notice details. A hero who identifies the designer and exact color of the heroine’s dress is not going to come off as realistic. Yes, some heterosexual men can identify colors like puce or burnt sienna, if they’re artists like my stepmother’s brother. But most men will say “purple” or “brown”, like my hubby.

Male or female, a believable character will mirror real life in how they address others.  We don’t speak to our supervisors the same way we do our toddlers (tempting as that may be on occasion). Depending on the time and place, it can be inappropriate for a man to swear at, or in the presence of, ladies — and ladies might be prohibited from using anything stronger than ‘lud’ or ‘darn’. Of course, even a proper gentleman and lady involved in certain intimate activities might use crude language with their partners, to their mutual enjoyment.  Context and motivation are key reasons behind a writer’s word choice. ;)

Do you have any favorite conversations between characters in your books? I’d love to hear about them.

And as an extra bonus, I’ll send out a wee little prize related to Her Scottish Groom to the first person who identifies the actors pictured at the top if this post, along with their best-known science fiction roles. Hint: the photo is from a British production of Hamlet.

2 Comments

Filed under Contests, Writing

Tagged as , , , , ,

September 14, 2010 · 17:23

An Evening’s Entertainment

Nellie Melba as Ophelie in Thomas' Hamlet

I love dance and theater history, and it’s hard for me to resist references to plays, operas and ballets when I write.  The British public embraced theatrical entertainment well before Shakespeare blazed his way into history during the Elizabethan Era.  After the Restoration, London society, high and low, attended plays and concerts.  Even uber-sourpuss Oliver Cromwell enjoyed music and singing so much that he permitted opera performances during the otherwise theatrically-barren Protectorate.

My first book, To be Seduced, is placed just at the beginning of Charles II‘s reign, when English theater was about to burst into flame again, in no small part because of the introduction of a major innovation from France: the actress.  Women had been on the boards in Paris for decades, but the idea of female performers did not catch on in England until Charles II claimed his father’s throne.

While actresses or ‘opera dancers’ were regarded as fair game for a wealthy man in search of a night’s erotic amusement, attending performances was a respectable past time for their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters.  In the nineteenth century, even Queen Victoria attended the theater regularly.

In To be Seduced, Richard and Bethany attend a performance that begins in the afternoon, allowing patrons to return home during the relatively safe daytime hours (no streetlamps in 1661 London!) and permitting the use of natural light coming in through windows in the theater to help illuminate the performance.  By the time Kieran and Diantha in Her Scottish Groom attend a performance at the Opera Gautier in Paris over 200 years later, the streets and stages alike used gas lighting, enabling evening performances.

Afternoon or evening, audience members dressed to attend the theater.  It was, after all, an opportunity to display yourself to the world, especially when seated in a box above the main floor!  Even when Restoration playwrights had to to convert tennis courts into theaters, individual audience members knew their place: backless benches on the floor for the lowest classes, open gallery seating for the middle classes and private boxes for the aristocracy.  By the Gilded Age , the most luxurious theaters attached sitting rooms to their most expensive boxes.

The sumptuous appointments reserved for the wealthiest patrons contrasted sharply with backstage conditions for actors, dancers and singers.  Especially in their early careers, chorus girls and beginning actresses had a hard time making ends meet.  (Hence their rececptivity to the above-mentioned propositions.)  Rehearsal attendance was required, but not paid for.  Neither were costumes, wigs or accessories.  Many used the stage as a stepping-stone to a life of upscale prostitution for a few years, but many other women dedicated themselves to becoming skilled artists.  In the theater in particular, many women married fellow actors for their own Happy Ever Afters.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Actresses, Ballet, Music, Opera, Theater history

Tagged as , , , ,