Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

62 Chapter 4 The Playwright
Bruce Norris was awarded the 2012 Tony Award and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his Clybourne Park, which picks up the
story of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic 1950s A Raisin in the Sun exactly where it left off (see the chapter entitled “Global
Theatre Today”)—on a day in 1959 in which an African American family is about to move into a home in an all-white
Chicago suburban community. Norris’s sadly funny sequel begins with the white family moving out of that same suburban
home that day, and discussing the situation with their deeply upset neighbors and their black housekeeper and her
husband. The Playwrights Horizons premiere production, directed by Pam McKinnon, transferred to Los Angeles’s Mark
Taper Forum in 2011, where this photo was taken, and reopened on Broadway with the same cast in 2012. © Joan Marcus
series of abstract observations or a collage of descriptions
and moralizings; it is an ordering of observable, dramatizable
events. These events are the basic building blocks
of the play, regardless of its style or genre or theme.
Fundamentally, the playwright works with two tools
that both represent the externals of human behavior: dialogue
and physical action. The inner story and theme of a
play—the psychology of the characters, the viewpoint of
the author, the impact of the social environment—must
be inferred by the audience from the play’s events as the
audience sees them. Whatever the playwright’s intended
message and perspective, the play cannot be put together
until the playwright has conceived of an event—and then
a series of related events—designed to be enacted on a
stage. It is this series of related events that constitutes the
play’s scenario or, more formally, its plot.
The events of drama are, by their nature, compelling.
Some are bold and unusual, such as in Shakespeare’s
King Lear, when the Duke of Cornwall plucks out the
eye of the Earl of Gloucester. Some are subdued, as
when the military regiment in Chekhov’s The Three
Sisters leaves town at the play’s end. And some are quite
ordinary, as in the domestic sequences depicted in most
modern realist plays—take, for instance, the opening of
the 2007 drama Rabbit Hole, which features a woman
folding laundry. The action seems banal enough, but as
we slowly learn more information, it carries tremendous
weight. Regardless of their content, events are always
aimed at creating a memorable impression. To begin
playwriting, one must first conceptualize events and
envision them enacted in such a way as to hold the attention
of an audience.