Thoughts on Playwriting

by Kirk Woodward

[My longtime friend Kirk Woodward is the one person I know with the broadest experience and knowledge of theater.  I’ve gone through this list a number of times on this blog, but it’s important to do so again now: Kirk’s an actor, acting teacher, singer, accompanist (piano), and reviewer (his book The Art of Writing Reviews is available on his website http://spiceplays.com/). 

[His two main theatrical occupations, however, are directing and playwriting.  (Kirk writes both musicals and non-musical plays, so he’s also a composer and lyricist.)  He’s been doing at least some of these things since before I knew him—and that’s 55 years now.  That’s a lot of years to cover a lot of territory in the theatrical world. 

[Kirk also reads a lot—about all kinds of subjects, including religion and philosophy as well as the Beatles—a favorite subject, along with Bob Dylan—and, of course, the stage and its people.  He’s going to talk to us this time about writing plays—but he’s not going to talk from books or classrooms; he’s going to talk to us from his experience . . . lived experience.

[Pay heed.  I guarantee you’ll pick up a few things—about theater, art, playwriting . . . and even people and little about life, too.  Don’t take my word—check it out!

[“Thoughts on Playwriting” isn’t Kirk’s first foray into this topic: on 18 February 2016, I published “How to Write a Play” by Kirk Woodward on Rick On Theater; on 19 July 2020, Kirk’s “Playwriting Bake-Off” described the process he used to compose a play for a contest; and on 22 July 2020, I posted Kirk’s “Dance Break,” the script he created.  (You’ll find other theater-related articles by Kirk mentioned in his article below.)]

Since this article is about playwriting, I ought to give a brief summary of my experience in the field. I’ve written dozens of plays, primarily in three categories: multi-act comedies or dramas; plays for young audiences; and one-act plays for adults. Of these, some thirty have been performed somewhere. None have been published by any of the major theatrical printing houses (at least initially my fault – I haven’t tried very hard).

Several have had multiple productions, a good sign. One, a musical version of The Wind in the Willows for which I was co-lyricist, toured the country for two years. A commissioned narration I wrote for a concert version of Candide (1956) was absorbed by the owner of the rights for the work, a mark of approval if not a financial benefit. I have usually written by myself; the actor Ken Jennings wrote most of the Wind in the Willows I just referred to, and I have happily collaborated with Mona Hennessy, when we wrote together for our touring children’s theater company, and with Martha Day on several one-act plays.

So I have some background in playwriting, and I will presume on that in order to write about the experience from my point of view. I will phrase this piece as a series of instructions to playwrights, not that they need any; it’s just, as we say in the theater, a convention (that is, a device in a play that helps get the story told efficiently).

A related convention in this article is that I will write as though “you” want to be a playwright, and I hope that this perspective will be useful in giving a picture of how one playwright, at least – me – thinks, feels, and works.

JOIN THE DRAMATISTS GUILD. First things first. If you’ve had a play performed, if you’ve written a play, or, frankly, if you’ve so much as imagined writing one, you should join the Dramatists Guild (not to be confused with the Writers Guild, which represents film and television writers). It’s not a union, it’s literally a guild – a craft association – and an extremely good one.

It fights for playwrights’ legal rights; it will advise you on contracts, without charge; it assists indigent older members; it sponsors terrific lectures and has representatives across the country and in Canada; and its magazine, The Dramatist, features excellent discussions on various topics among playwrights both famous and not.

All in all, the Guild is a dream of a resource. Its address is 1501 Broadway, Suite 701, New York, New York, 10036, and its phone number is (212) 398-9366. I’m serious – “join the Guild” is about the best advice a playwright can have.

REGISTER YOUR WORK. While we’re on the subject of outside organizations, be sure to register your work with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. This can be done online; there’s a fee, but currently you can group ten separate works together in one application.

People often refer to this procedure as “copyrighting your play.” It’s not, exactly, it’s registering it; you own the copyright when you write the play, but how would you prove it if you have to? So register it, too.

HAVE A GOOD IDEA. Obvious? Maybe not – otherwise every play would be a success.  In particular, now and then an idea seems almost to write itself. Bernard Slade (1930-2019) had an idea about a couple who meet for a one-night stand every year; that idea became the enormously successful play Same Time, Next Year (1975) and its success could easily have been predicted from the idea – that’s how solid the concept was. (I met someone who came to the same conclusion, invested in the show, and became unbelievably rich.)

Not every idea is great; good ideas are important; and a playwright may simply start to write, without any idea in mind at all – it’s been done. A snatch of dialogue, a fleeting image, the sound of a voice . . . anything can lead to a good play.

But there’s something to be said for letting the idea find you, if possible, rather than the reverse. Critics have observed that Noel Coward (1899-1973) had more success with the plays he wrote that came to him more or less fully formed, than he did with plays when he had to struggle and revise them extensively.

Similarly the reviewer Walter Kerr (1913-1996) wrote about the play The Star-Spangled Girl (1966) that Neil Simon (1927-2018) “hasn't had an idea for a play this season, but he's gone ahead and written one anyway," and Simon admitted that was probably the truth. (I felt the same about his later play Rumors of 1988, but it had a run of over 500 performances, so my opinion clearly is not worth much.)

Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote in his Poetics (c. 335 BC) that plot is “the life and soul of the drama,” and one can make the case that a play “exists” before it is written down in dialogue form. There is a story, conceivably true, about the French playwright Jean Racine (1633-1699) coming to a party in a good mood and announcing, “I’ve just finished my new play. All I need to do now is write the dialogue.”

In teaching playwriting I have always taught that the important thing in writing a play is the idea . . . the most important thing in writing it, not necessarily in achieving a successful production, which is an issue further down the line. Not only in writing a play, but in any kind of writing, the “getting it down on paper” (or whatever medium one uses) ought to precede the editing, and many people tangle themselves in knots by trying both to write and to edit at the same time.     

One might object that playwriting is different in this regard from writing¸ say, a novel or a poem, because the success of a play depends on its structure. I don’t argue with this idea if one wants to write a highly structured play, but that’s by no means the only choice. There are others.

There are, for example, episodic plays like those of the “epic theatre” of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). There are also numerous experimental works, and there is a current generation of playwrights who regard a tight dramatic structure as oppressive and/or culturally biased.

In addition, playwrights may write a script believing they are writing “whatever comes to mind,” when they are actually filling out a structure that already exists in their subconscious minds. I have had the experience of writing a play that knew exactly where it was going, even though I didn’t, something I discovered when the play was completed.

In a survey of the plays of Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that I wrote for this blog (“Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016), I noted that there are both plays that Shaw tightly plotted from the first, and plays that he wrote as the words came to him.

NEATNESS COUNTS. Once you’ve written what you want to write, getting produced and/or published is of course a different matter. At that point one might want to think of production issues like scenery and cast sizes. Does the play really require that Mars set? Is that sea nymph really a necessary character?

The answer, of course, may be yes – it’s your play. Others will evaluate your choices in terms of what they are looking for.

In any case, it’s a good idea to circulate your play in a standard script layout. There’s no one acceptable format, but here is an excellent guideline: http://www.caryplaywrightsforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/CPF_play_formatting-1.pdf.

The Theatre Communications Group (520 Eighth Avenue 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156; Tel: 1-212-609-5900 | Fax: 1-212-609-5901; E-mail: info@tcg.org) puts out the Dramatists Sourcebook which provides information to playwrights about theaters (limited to TCG members) that accept unsolicited scripts and what criteria submitted plays should meet.  DSB also lists who the staffer at each theater is who receives scripts and inquiries.  (DSB used to be an annual publication, but now it only comes out periodically.  The latest edition seems to be 2010.)

Many theaters and contests enlist play readers whose job is to pass recommendations on to others for further reading. Their job is a strenuous one and anything you can do to make it easier for them, like formatting your play so it’s easy to read, will be appreciated.

Playwrights have told me that readers nowadays want extensive stage directions so they don’t have to work hard at visualizing a scene or action. Maybe so. Some playwrights are minimalists when it comes to stage directions. There’s undoubtedly a middle ground.

WRITE TO DEMAND. Once a play has been written, how does one get it produced? The best way is to write a play so overwhelmingly good that it has to be produced, and may you be the one to do it. Failing that, however, there are other approaches.

One can submit plays to theaters and contests, and resources available from the Dramatists Guild will help you in that. If you can get an agent, your play will be submitted to theaters that otherwise won’t look at it.

An agent may also be able to tell you if your play was accepted or rejected. Otherwise, be prepared for extensive uncertainty, since many theaters and contests never bother to reply at all.

There are two ways of getting a play produced that have a better than average chance of succeeding. I have used them both, with a great deal of satisfaction. The first is to write plays that you know somebody wants.

For example, a play I wrote won the 1990 Hardin County Playwriting Contest – in fact I suspect there were few serious entrants, because as I recall, the author had to be from Kentucky (I am); the play had to take place in the Hardin County Library, because that’s where it would be staged; and the story had to be a mystery of some sort. I wrote a play to meet the criteria, and had the great satisfaction of traveling to the library and seeing my characters wandering around the stacks, plus getting a check.

I mentioned above that I co-wrote lyrics for a version of The Wind in the Willows. This happened because Ken Jennings, the principal writer, sang and acted out the entire script at a party late one night, indicating in certain places that he hadn’t finished a particular song. I asked him if he’d like me to see if I could complete the incomplete lyrics, and he was satisfied with the result.

In another instance, a friend who taught and directed at a regional community college wanted to produce a “Living Newspaper” at the school. The Living Newspaper was a kind of play particularly associated with the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), in which news stories of the day were dramatized in a revue format. My friend wanted to do a Living Newspaper on the AIDS crisis, which was rampant at the time.

Shortly before his rehearsals were due to start, I asked my friend if he had a script to work with and he said he actually didn’t. I volunteered to write one; I had less than a week in which to deliver it.

I camped out with a copy of And the Band Played On (1987) by Randy Shilts, and whenever I saw something in it that gave me an idea for a scene, I wrote it. With the addition of a few student-written scenes, voila! We had a play.

A cautionary side story: some months later a cashier at a bookstore turned out to have been in the play. I didn’t tell her I had written it, but said I’d seen it, and complimented her on her acting. “Thanks,” she said, “it was difficult. The dialogue was awful.” To each their own. I should have told her I was the author right up front.

I have written plays for local dinner theater productions; for theaters that wanted new plays for young audiences (“children’s theater”); for drama schools, because they needed something to meet specific class requirements; for church anniversaries; for a theater that needed a play specifically about Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus; and so on.

A caution: unless you agree to accept a writing job as a “work for hire,” protect your ownership of the piece – don’t sign it away, as theaters, producers, and others will often try to get you to do. The Dramatists Guild will advise you on how to protect your rights. Plays are the property of their authors unless the authors specify otherwise, and one must be extremely wary of situations where your rights are at risk.

If you do the best you can with whatever you write, nothing says it can’t have a further life after the first production. Andrew Lloyd Weber (b. 1948) and Tim Rice (b. 1944) wrote the first version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1967) for a school choir, at the request of its supervising teacher, and it has been produced continually ever since.

SELF-PRODUCE. If one strategy for getting your play produced is to write it to fill someone’s need, another is to produce it yourself.

With yourself as producer, you are reasonably certain of getting a production of your play. Actors will jump at the chance to work if they are available. Your family and friends certainly wouldn’t miss such an event, especially if you don’t charge admission.

Expenses depend on the scope of the production. At one end of the scale, a reading in your back yard will cost nothing. At the other end are the so-called “vanity productions” in which an author finances a full production and, if necessary, keeps it running with the author’s own money. You presumably won’t charge yourself royalties for your play.

I have directed several “living room productions” that were staged, with the actors memorizing their roles, but without sets or costumes. The COVID crisis has made another kind of staging possible – presenting a play on a platform like Zoom. I have written about both kinds of performances, both live and virtual, in this blog (“MicroRep,” 27 July 2017; “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report,” 19 May 2020; “Acting Class (On-Line Edition),” 4 Aug. 2020).

Hearing your play performed is valuable no matter how it’s done. So is seeing the reactions of a real audience. The following is a warning, however.

YAKKETY YAK, DON’T TALKBACK. Theaters may want to hold “talkbacks” after a reading or performance, or you may want to, in order to collect feedback on the piece. I have the impression that playwrights increasingly dread this practice, because it is often either useless or destructive.

A talkback, if not carefully structured, invites people who just heard your play for the first time to tell you what they’d do if they’d written it. They didn’t write it, you did. If the talkback isn’t carefully structured, the most you get out of it may be a headache.

I suggest two rules for a talkback, and if they’re not accepted, I would refuse to allow one. First: set a time limit, and when that limit is reached, end the session, because otherwise it may go on forever. Second: make it clear to everyone that all you want to know is what worked well for them in the play, and what didn’t. 

Based on those questions, you may get something valuable out of the comments, or you may not, and unless an observation strikes you as a revelation, probably the best thing to do is to say thank you to everything (not trying to defend yourself or the play, go away, let time pass, and allow the things you’ve heard to simmer in your subconscious mind.

It’s your play; you know it better than anyone. The old adage that “plays aren’t written but rewritten” contains a tiny grain of truth for certain kinds of plays, but in general is a recipe for trouble. William Goldman (1931-2018), in his must-read book The Season (1969) about Broadway theater, writes about rewriting:

It’s as if you want to go north, due north, that’s the place, and off you start. But then there’s a change and then another, and suddenly you’re heading north by northeast, and that isn’t quite the same any more, but what the hell, it’s close enough, it’s still north. And then one morning you wake up, and the sun’s dead in your face, and you think, “East, huh?,” and then you think, “East? I don’t wanna go east, I’m a north man.” And then you think, “Well, what the hell, at least I’m moving and – east, north – motion’s the thing; when you get right down to it, I’m a motion man more than anything.” And on you go . . . .

Don’t go there.

PUBLISH AND/OR BE DAMNED. For me, having a play published is a gold standard of playwriting success, so I should begin by reiterating that none of my plays have been published by a major publishing house. As i acknowledged, I haven’t tried very hard, discouraged, possibly, by a rejection note I received from a publisher in Boston that read, in its entirety, “Further consideration of your play would be beneficial neither to us nor to you.”

I do have my plays listed on the web, on a site called spiceplays.com. The Internet has loosened the grip that the major theatrical publishing houses held on the circulation of plays. However, those publishers are nevertheless important and valuable. They make plays widely available, and they cheer the spirits of the playwrights whose plays they publish. Even catalogues full of scripts that will never, never see a “major” production may contain gems.

Publishing houses ordinarily want your plays to have been produced somewhere before they will consider them. Beyond that, the principle seems to be the same as that of job interviews: know everything you can about who you’re dealing with. See what kinds of plays a particular publisher wants, and try, if interested, to supply them.

GIVE THE DIALOG A HAIRCUT. Recently I wanted to enter a full length play in a contest that only wanted longish one act plays. The obvious solution was to trim the full length play. I found that I could shorten it considerably by attacking a mannerism I hadn’t realized my writing had: beginning a line of dialogue with a reaction to the previous line, before going on to the next thought. For example:

ONE: I’m going to the grocery.
TWO: The grocery! You know you eat too much.

There’s nothing wrong with TWO’s line, but the phrase “The grocery!” only slows the conversation down. It’s better to write:

ONE: I’m going to the grocery.
TWO: You know you eat too much.

This second example intensifies the tension between the two characters, and in its small way it keeps the action moving. The moral of this story: it’s never too late to learn something new.

ENJOY THE SATISFACTIONS. While watching a rehearsal for something I’d written, I sat next to a friend who has had a long career in Broadway theater and who knows just about everyone you’ve ever heard of. I understand he’s writing a book, and I can’t wait to read it.

Without warning he leaned over and said to me, “The higher you go in this business, the less the satisfaction.”

I don’t know if he’s correct, although he’s certainly had plenty of opportunity to observe what he’s talking about, but I do know that playwriting can offer great satisfaction at any level. Very likely it won’t go smoothly – the playwright Robert Anderson (1917-2009) had a sign over his desk that read

NOBODY ASKED YOU TO BE A PLAYWRIGHT.

But if you choose to be one, you may have a wonderful time with it. I certainly have.

[I have said that I don’t understand creative writing (including playwriting), but I have been a dramaturg/literary manager (who’d be the staffer to whom the scripts would be sent initially and who’d conduct the workshops and “talkbacks”) and I taught expository (non-fiction) writing, so those parts of the process are known to me.  As such, I have some thoughts I can share that parallel and support what Kirk had told us. 

[Kirk advises “formatting your play so it’s easy to read”: When I was a play reader myself, screening scripts for a play contest, I wrote this in my 1996 evaluation report for a script called Natural Child:

Summarizing this play is nearly impossible because it’s not linear.  [The playwright] says that his textual model is the Talmud, and, indeed, his playtext looks much like pages from that book.  (Unfortunately, the Talmud wasn’t written to be performed, but studied in scholarly solitude and then discussed in a Socratic forum.  This makes reading Natural Child as a potential performance text extremely difficult.)

[A page of the Talmud contains in its center a passage from the Torah (the Bible).  All around it are scholarly explanations, arguments, discussions, interpretations from down the centuries addressing the passage.

[Kirk says, “SELF-PRODUCE”: In 1982, I directed Comes the Happy Hour!, a play by an acquaintance, Ken Greenberg.  He financed the Off-Off-Broadway production so we could be in control of all the aspects.  I had laid out the various production possibilities and their benefits and drawbacks (including the fact that Ken would lose his whole investment if we self-produced).  The one drawback I didn’t consider was that since none of us—I enlisted a friend who wanted to be a producer, to be ours—had a track record, we had no press clout.  Nonetheless, I was very proud of the work.

[Kirk asserts, “Actors will jump at the chance to work if they are available”: An actor I knew, Steve Fireman, used to say, “Actors will work for nothing . . . if you let them.”  (We joked about making up T-shirts with that on it!)

[“At the other end are the so-called ‘vanity productions,’” says Kirk, “in which an author finances a full production and, if necessary, keeps it running with the author’s own money”: Happy Hour (above) was a showcase—finite and limited.  But I wrote a report for ROT on Warren Manzi’s Perfect Crime (5 February 2011), an execrable Off-Broadway play my friend Diana and I saw.

[Perfect Crime was a commercial show and I called it a vanity production because everyone involved in it, including the director, producer, and lead actress, were all former or current associates when the play was first mounted and family money was used to put it up and keep it going.  (As awful as it is, Perfect Crime is still running after almost 35 years!)

[“Talkbacks”: As a literary manager, I was asked to set up one of these—but I dissuaded the artistic directors of the theater because I find the sessions valueless for the play or playwright.  Their only value is to the theater for making their subscribers feel as if they have some input into the play-selection process—it’s public relations (read: propaganda). 

[In the expository writing classes I taught, I also did Writers’ Workshops at which writers read their work for feedback from fellow students. .Because it was a class exercise, I could control it more than the theater talkbacks, and I could side-coach and even stop a discussion that was going in the wrong direction. 

[Kirk explains that “all [the writer] want[s] to know is what worked well for [the viewer] in the play, and what didn’t”: This doesn’t work.  I tried to get the student respondents in the writing classes to do this, and I had to keep prompting them not to suggest rewrites but to tell the writer what worked for them and what didn’t—and just to tell the writer what they heard or read. 

[In the theater version, with audience members as responders, they’re all going to try to tell the authors how to write the play the spectator wants to write, not how the play the playwright wrote can work better. 

[Kirk admonishes the writer “not [to try] to defend yourself or the play”: This is really important!!   I told my student writers not to answer back, explain, or argue with the responders—just to listen and make a note (written or mental, whichever works for them) and then think about the comments later at home in private.  I also told the writer, “You decide what to do with the comments—including ignore them.” 

 [“Further consideration of your play would be beneficial neither to us nor to you”:  This is terrible.  When I was lit-advising for a small Off-Off-Broadway showcase house, one of my first assignments was to compose sample letters of rejection that were positive and encouraging. 

[(I have a sort of example on ROT with the script report for Call the Serpent God to Me; see “Two Script Reports,” 20 February 2020.  The difference is that this wasn’t a rejection—I like this play a lot—but I had some reservations I had to find a way to pass on without sounding negative or discouraging—or like someone who wanted the playwright to rewrite her play to suit me.)]