Playwrights tend to think dialogue is what characters say. But dialogue is also what they refuse to say, cannot say, or desperately hope someone else will say first. Silence is not an absence of dialogue. It is dialogue stripped of words. Onstage, a silence can accuse, seduce, punish, protect, surrender, or lie. It can be the loudest moment in the play. But only if the playwright knows what is being said beneath it. [more]

Every writer knows the line. It may be witty, lyrical, devastating or startlingly true. The moment you wrote it, you felt the whole piece rise to meet it. You underlined it. You quoted it to friends. You waited for actors to discover it in rehearsal. Then, sooner or later, you confronted the terrible possibility that the line you loved most did not belong in the play. [more]

This is my 200th blog post. I wish I could say I began with a grand plan — that I knew what this blog would become and where all those words would lead me. I didn’t. I simply had things I wanted to say.

Theatre people love to speak of productions that “work.” The phrase suggests a well-built machine: every beat lands, every scene turns, every performance belongs to the same world. But some of the most memorable nights I’ve spent in a theatre did not work — not completely. They were uneven, overreaching, occasionally baffling and sometimes downright misguided. Their failures were not evidence of indifference. They were the bruises left by ambition. [more]

Theatre has never needed to look like life in order to tell the truth about it. A bare stage can become a battlefield. A chair can become a throne, a coffin or a childhood home. Actors can address the audience, trade identities, move backward through time or burst into song without sacrificing emotional credibility. Stylization frees theatre from the obligation to imitate reality. At its best, it does something more ambitious: it reveals what ordinary reality conceals.

Finishing a project can leave you with an unfamiliar problem: freedom. For months — or years — you knew what required your attention. Now a dozen ideas are circling, each insisting it should be next. The temptation is to choose the most impressive, the most commercial or the one you think you ought to pursue. But your next project should begin with a simpler question: Which idea still interests you when nobody is watching? [more]

Theatre should leave a bruise. Not necessarily a wound, and certainly not a lesion neatly bandaged before the audience goes home. But something should remain tender after the lights come up — a thought you cannot touch without feeling it again. You should carry some evidence of the encounter into the street. Otherwise, why gather living people in a room to watch other living people risk themselves in front of us? [more]

The first draft of a play is not the play. It is the playwright telling themselves the story — often too loudly, too carefully and in the wrong order. Characters explain what they already know. Scenes begin before anything happens and continue after everything is over. Themes arrive wearing name tags. This is not failure. The first draft has done its job if it has given you something solid enough to argue with. [more]

The playwright writes the play. The director makes the play happen. That sounds like a clean division of labor, but it rarely is. A play that seems perfectly clear on the page may become confusing the moment actors speak it aloud. A scene the playwright considers devastating may get an unintended laugh; a speech the director expects to stop the show may leave the audience restless. [more]

Every playwright knows the scene that refuses to work. The confrontation lacks heat. The revelation produces no surprise. The character’s sudden decision feels arbitrary, so the writer adds speeches, raises voices, inserts pauses, and rearranges the furniture. Still, the scene lies dead on the page. The problem may not be in the scene at all. [more]