1. Playwrights
It’s a dirty job,
but someone’s gotta do it!

2. Playwrights
• “wright” = Maker
• Started out non-professional
– For the Greeks, the writers were doing their civic
duty, honoring the gods during their festivals
– Medieval plays were largely anonymous, often
identified by the town where they were
performed (The York Cycle, for example)
– Many non-Western plays (Sanskrit, Kabuki, etc.)
were also anonymous

3. Playwrights
• Theatre and playwriting
became professionalized in the
Renaissance and into the Neoclassical period
As theatre moved away from the role it played
with the church – educating the people – it
moved toward entertainment. And people
were willing to pay to be entertained! So
professional companies started sprouting up.
They were usually sponsored by some
nobleman who would help them pay their
expenses and protect them from intervention
by the authorities. Since then, playwriting has
become a well established and respected
profession!

4. How Do They Work?
• Some write alone
• Some write with partners
• Some write as a collective

5. What do they write?
• Straight plays
– Plays that are spoken dialogue without singing are
referred to as “straight plays” and the people who
write them are called playwrights.
• Musicals
– Plays that include songs are called “musicals” and
we call the people who write the music
“composers,” the people who write the lyrics
“lyricists” and the people who write the spoken
portion of the script “librettists.”

6. Where do they start?
• Beginning to end
Like with any art form, there is no
• End to beginning one way to write a play. Some
people will write straight through
• Piece by piece from the beginning to the end,
some people work backwards,
• Thematically some people skip around. Some
have a strong idea of the theme,
• Characters first and they let the story grow from
there. Some start with the
• Outline characters. Some have an outline
while others write more free-form.
• Etc… However they do it, they are
putting together events to create a
plot of some kind.

7. Sometimes you just have to write…
• “I just started writing a line of dialogue
and had no idea who was
talking…Someone says something to
someone else, and they talk, and at
some point I say, ‘Well, who is this?’ and
I give him a name. But I have no idea
what the story line of the play is. It’s a
process of discovery.”
- August Wilson, multiple Pulitzer
Prize winning playwright We’re reading Fences by August
Wilson this unit. Take a look at
some of his thoughts on writing.

8. Play Development Cycle
The first draft of what a playwright writes will
• First Draft probably go through several stages of revision
before the final product that is produced and
• Reading (Table) published. First is the table read, when actors
sit around a table and read the play aloud for
• Next Draft the first time. This usually gives the playwright
a lot of ideas for revisions. Then there might
• Staged Reading be a staged reading, with actors still reading
from scripts, but this time they’re up on their
• Next Draft feet. This leads to another revision and then
possibly a workshop production, which is
• Workshop closer to a full production. The actors might
memorize their lines and there would be some
• Next Draft minor set and costume pieces. This could go
on in a loop of workshops and revisions for a
while before finally being ready for a full public
• Full Production production.

9. Stage Directions
Depending on the playwright and the type of play, the stage directions supplied by the
playwright could be very realistic like this:
• The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in
New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs
between the L&N tracks and the river. The section is
poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other
American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are
mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety
outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented
gables. This building consists of two flats, upstairs and
down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of
both.
It is the first dark of an evening early in May. The sky
that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly
tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene
with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the
atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm
breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses This gives the director and
with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee […] (A
Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams)
designers some very specific
information to work with in
building the world of the play.

10. Stage Directions
Or they could be more stylized and open to interpretation
like this:
• Beggars are begging, thieves thieving,
whores whoring. A ballad singer sings a
Moritat. (Threepenny Opera, Brecht and
Weill)
Or they could be completely abstract, leaving lots of room for
the director’s and designers’ imagination like this:
• A great hole. In the middle of nowhere.
The hole is an exact replica of the Great
Hole of History. (The America Play, Suzan
Lori-Parks)
Then, it’s up to the director and designers to decide what to do
with the directions they have been given by the playwright.

11. How do you know about a character?
– Stage Directions
• “Two men come around the corner, Stanley Kowalski and Mitch. They
are about twenty-eight or thirty years old, roughly dressed in blue
denim work clothes. Stanley carries his bowling jacket and a red-stained
package from a butcher’s.” (A Streetcar Named Desire)
– What the character says about themselves
• “They didn’t fire me cause I wasn’t no good. They fired me cause they
was cutting back. Me getting dismissed didn’t have no reflection on my
performance. And I was a damn good Honest Abe considering.” (Top
Dog/Underdog)
– What other people say about the character
• “Gordon could be quiet… He must have respected you. He was quiet
with women he respected. Otherwise he had a very loud laugh. Haw,
haw, haw! You could hear him a mile away.” (Dead Man’s Cell Phone)
– What the character DOES
• “I ain’t worried about them firing me. They gonna fir me ‘cause I asked
a question? That’s all I did. I went to Mr. Rand and asked him, “Why?
Why you got the white mens driving and the colored lifting?” Told him,
“What’s the matter, don’t I count? You think only white fellows got
sense enough to drive a truck. Hell, anybody can drive a truck.” He told
me, “Take it to the union.” Well, hell, that’s what I done!” (Fences)

12. What do you need to know?
As part of his discussion about tragedy, Aristotle also talked about the things we need
to know about characters
• Physical/Biological Characteristics – What does the
character look like? Is he tall or short? Handsome
or ugly?
• Social: What is the character’s job, economic class,
family and how do these affect his community
relationship?
• Psychological: What are the character’s likes,
dislikes, desires, fears, motivations, etc.?
• Moral: What is a character willing to do to get what
they want? (This one can be tougher, because
characters don’t always talk about their morals in a
straightforward way. Often you have to look at
what they DO to discover their moral beliefs.

13. Put it all together…
• Konstantin Stanislavsky
– Given Circumstances
Konstantin Stanislavski was a very smart man
who we’ll be talking about a lot more in later
units. But for now, we’ll stick with this very
important term that he coined: Given
Circumstances. This was his term for all the
information that the playwright provides
about the world of the play. Anything the
playwright tells us about the location, the
society, the characters, etc. would all be
considered part of the given circumstances.

14. Playwrights to Know
• William Shakespeare
– 1564-1616
– One of the most important
writers in Western literature
– Performed as part of a
company called The Lord
Chamberlain’s men
(remember those rich
sponsors), which later became
The King’s Men
– Performed at The Globe
Theatre
– In addition to being a
playwright, he was also an
actor
– Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Much
Ado About Nothing, The
Winter’s Tale, etc…

15. Playwrights to Know
• Aphra Behn
– 1640-1689
– First known
professional female
playwright (yes, this
means that she was
making money as a
playwright)
– The Rover, The
Emperor of the Moon

16. Playwrights to Know
• Bertolt Brecht
– 1898-1956
– German Marxist playwright
known for his social
commentary
– Verfremdungseffekt
(Alienation effect) – Brecht
believed that his audiences
should not get lost in the
world of the play, he
wanted them to stay
detached so that they could
think critically about the
ideas he was presenting.
– Mother Courage and Her
Children, The Threepenny
Opera, Galileo

17. Playwrights to Know
• Tennessee Williams
– 1911-1983
– American playwright
who wrote a lot about
the South, famous for
his use of imagery
– Summer and Smoke, A
Streetcar Named
Desire, The Glass
Menagerie

18. Playwrights to Know
• Arthur Miller
– 1915-2005
– Pulitzer Prize winner
– Married to Marilyn
Monroe for a while
– Blacklisted by the
House Un-American
Affairs Committee
during the Red Scare
– Death of a Salesman,
All My Sons, The
Crucible

19. Playwrights to Know
• Neil Simon
– 1927-
– Prolific comic
playwright and
screenwriter
– The Odd Couple,
Barefoot in the Park,
Brighton Beach
Memoirs

20. Playwrights to Know
• Lorraine Hansberry
– 1930-1965
– First African American
Female playwright to
have a play produced
on Broadway
– A Raisin in the Sun,
The Drinking Gourd

21. Playwrights to Know
• August Wilson
– 1945-2005
– Wrote a cycle of ten
plays - one for each
decade of the 20th
century - about the
black experience in
America
– Won TWO Pulitzers
– Fences, The Piano
Lesson, Gem of the
Ocean

22. Playwrights to Know
• Suzan-Lori Parks
– 1963-
– First African-American
female playwright to
win a Pulitzer Prize for
Drama
– Top Dog/Underdog,
Venus, The Death of the
Last Black Man in the
Whole Entire World

23. Playwrights to Know
• Sarah Ruhl
– 1974-
– Two time Pulitzer
nominee
– I’m going to write my
dissertation about her
(part of it, anyway)!
– The Clean House, Dead
Man’s Cell Phone, In
the Next Room or The
Vibrator Play