All told, I haven't read or seen very many plays. Over the last few months, I've started browsing shelves marked "Drama," "Theatre," and "Playwrights." Generally, these shelves can be browsed in a minute, and that's if you're being thorough--reading each title and tugging every spine, one by one. The Santa Barbara Central Library, heavy on melodrama and morality, left a lot to be desired (not that I could tell you what was missing). Still, no matter how limited the selection, these shelves are unnavigable to me. My narrow compass is useless outside the land of High School Musical Theatre.*
This is why I've jury rigged a new compass to keep me from walking in circles. It has only two cardinal points: plays other people expressly recommend, and plays by people I am already familiar with. In place of magnetic precision, my compass offers safe bets. More often than not, this means playwrights who were originally, or primarily, poets. I keep meaning to read Pinter and Albee and Labute, but when I see an e.e. cummings play, hot damn! How can that not be good?! It's led me to some interesting reads, and even more interesting questions, which keep me browsing those shelves.
Naturally, I've spent some time thinking about what differentiates a play from a poem, and how the mediums interact. I want to know if there is such a thing as writing-a-play-as-a-poet, and writing-a-poem-as-a-playwright, and whether the writing would be distinct as such. "Poem" and "Play" are constructs, but they're ingrained and operable; we know which one we're looking at, and I think it's safe to continue talking about them.
Certain poetic disciplines are also the building blocks, in my opinion, of a strong dramatic piece. For me, poems require close attention to structure--planned or unplanned, formal or informal--and a careful reduction of images. A poem places you in an elastically bound space, hands you the essential objects, then leaves. Plays do the same, only literally. Poets are deliberate with every syllable, treating linguistic minutiae like volatile genetic material. Similarly, playwrights are responsible for each word, considering how it reveals or masks a character.
Playwriting, in my very limited experience, is like stepping inside a poem and making its internal argument apparent. Any implicit tensions or questions are animated. The transition from poem to play is like taking a puzzling piece of machinery, separating all its parts, and laying them out so their relations to one another become obvious, if not explicable.
It's pretty stupid to talk about poems because they are what they are. Lyricism, nonsense, playfulness, stillness, description, intimacy, ambiguity--in a poem, anything can be an end. You know how when you read a poem, you kind of hear it in a voice that's coming from the place where your ribs join? Or how this knotted awareness forms in your stomach? I want to know how this can happen in a play without sacrificing narrative or always succumbing to surrealism. In other words, I want to write something accessible, relatable, easy to follow, and convincing, yet retain that feeling that it's all being spoken by a very beautiful voice inside you.
Maybe that's not the point of a play, though. Maybe the point is to make you face up to others and give equal attention to several incongruous voices at once. Can a poem do this? Probably. What is a poem again? A play? Fuck, maybe it's not safe to talk about this, after all. Form is important and inescapable (it all comes back to architecture), but as soon as you inhabit one, it yields itself.
I would be wise to give you an example before we all evaporate.
<a href="http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_undermilkwood.html"Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas
This is technically "a play for voices," and was originally performed for radio. It was later made into a film featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole, which, I must admit, is difficult for me to envision. Under Milk Wood is like music. It is written in the dialect of a small, Welsh, sea-side town--a dialect that was in Thomas' blood. It's rhythm is pronounced, and Thomas indulges--no, luxuriates--in consonance, alliteration and rhyme. I would love to hear it performed; even in reading the language is enough to carry the play without plot or content:
FIRST VOICE
Vegetables make love above the tenors.
SECOND VOICE
and dogs bark blue in the face.
FIRST VOICE
Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases the sunlight with a flywhisk, but even she cannot drive out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls, a primrose grows.
C'mon, I could listen to lines like that on repeat, no context necessary.
Under Milk Wood presents a cycle, opening and closing at dawn. The day we observe (hear?) could be any day at all, the limited cast going about their chores and repeating well-worn gossip. This gives it a mythic quality; the town may as well be the only existence, and its people eternal. The language supports this quality, reminding us of oracle and, well, poetry. Even when you're not sure what's happening, you can remain present with each line, and sense the earthy magic of the town and people.
FIRST VOICE (very softly)
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, chinadog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
The story is narrated by these Voices, but specific characters also speak, relieving the heavy flow of third-person description. People with names like Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard, Gossamer Beynon, Willy Nilly and Polly Garter often speak in playful, rhyming stanzas. This acts like a cue for the listener--someone is speaking now. The polished, plain verse of the characters stands in contrast to the detailed, near-stream-of-consciousness narration. The Voices immerse the listener and build like waves, then break against a person. The effect is that these persons feel crisp and real.
SECOND VOICE
The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lorldly fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who'll sear and pillage down Armageddon hill to his double-locked rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.
POLLY GARTER
And I'll never have such loving again,
SECOND VOICE
Pretty Polly hums and longs.
POLLY GARTER (sings)
Now when farmers boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I'll lie there in their arms
For they're good bad boys from the lonely farms...
Isn't it beautiful? You can listen to the full thing here and here.
* If you're unsure if what you're looking at is a musical, ask yourself, Does the title end in an exclamation point? If yes, you've got a musical on your hands. Fortunately, there are many other obvious indicators that should tip you off before you even look at a title. Also, nobody reads musicals.
