The well-made play has become the theatrical equivalent of a respectable relative: admired, occasionally visited, and blamed for everything conventional. Its machinery is familiar. Information is carefully planted. A secret from the past disturbs the present. Complications accumulate. Revelations arrive precisely when they can do the most damage. By the final curtain, the action has reached an inevitable — and usually satisfying — conclusion.[more]

The trouble with writing a play about a famous person is that you already know too much. You know where they were born. You know whom they married, what they accomplished, what they wore, what they said, where they went, and how they died. You have dates, quotations, scandals, lovers, enemies, photographs, newspaper clippings and several biographies explaining what it all meant. This is useful for writing a Wikipedia page. It may be fatal for writing a play. [more]

The American theatre likes to describe itself as a home for new voices. But producing a new play is rarely a simple vote of confidence in a playwright. It is a financial decision disguised as an artistic one. [more]

A play can be beautifully written and still die onstage. It may have elegant language, complex ideas, vivid characters, and carefully shaped scenes. It may impress every reader who encounters it. Yet once actors stand up and speak the words, the play can feel strangely inert. That is the difference between page strength and stage vitality. [more]

The first time my work didn’t land, I thought the audience had failed me. They were quiet in the wrong places. They laughed at a moment I had treated with great seriousness and sat stone-faced through a line I was certain would destroy them. By the end, the applause was polite. Not hostile. Not disastrous. Worse, in a way: merely polite. [more]

“Places.” It is one of the smallest words in the theatrical vocabulary — and one of the most powerful. It means the house lights will soon dim. The conversations in the lobby will end. Programs will be folded and put away. Actors will stop being actors waiting to perform and become the people the audience has come to see. But between “Places” and the rise of the curtain, there is a strange, suspended interval that belongs only to the theatre. [more]

Early in their careers — before David Mamet wrote only polemics and Neil LaBute wrote the same play over and over again — they were often grouped together because both wrote combative dialogue about power, masculinity, sex, and betrayal. But they made speech work in fundamentally different ways. [more]

There is a point in rehearsal when everyone begins to suspect the play may be terrible. The actors have learned enough of it to recognize the problems but not enough to disguise them. The director’s early confidence has become oddly specific: “Let’s try entering two beats sooner.” The playwright sits in the corner pretending to make useful notes while privately wondering whether a different profession might still be possible. [more]

Actors have to stand somewhere. That doesn’t mean their position means anything. Too much stage blocking is merely traffic control: cross on this line, sit for this speech, move downstage so the audience can see you. It keeps the stage from becoming static, but movement alone does not create life. When blocking exists only to fill space, actors begin moving because the director is afraid of stillness. [more]

“Slow” is not a synonym for “profound.” A play can be quiet, patient, even nearly motionless — and still be dramatically alive. But when slowness is used to imitate seriousness, the audience feels the strain. Long pauses do not automatically create subtext. Sparse dialogue does not guarantee mystery. Silence is meaningful only when something urgent is being withheld inside it. [more]