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

66 Chapter 4 The Playwright
WOMAN: I thought you meant me. Before.
MAN: I’m sorry?
WOMAN: When you said that, “pretty big.” I thought you were
saying that to me. About me.
MAN: Oh, no, God, no! I wouldn’t . . . You did?
WOMAN: For a second.
MAN: No, that’d be . . . you know. Rude.
WOMAN: Still . . .
MAN: I mean, why would I do that? A thing like that? I’m
not . . .
WOMAN: You’d be surprised. People say all kinds of things
here.
MAN: In this place?
WOMAN: Of course. All the time.
MAN: About what?
She looks over at him without saying anything.
Silence.
WOMAN: …My hair color. (Beat) What do you think?
MAN: Oh, I see. (Smiles.) Sure . . .
WOMAN: It’s not a huge deal—I was just mentioning it.
MAN: Yeah, but . . .
WOMAN: You get used to it. I guess they think that—I don’t
know, after a certain size or whatever—that you don’t
have feelings or that kind of thing.
MAN: Geez, that’s hard to . . . I mean not that I don’t think
people are, you know, capable of it . . . but I just wouldn’t
think, not in your face.
The action of this scene could be expressed in just
two or three lines of dialogue, but how the characters
communicate—with awkward pauses, misunderstandings,
and half-finished thoughts—is more important
than what they are saying. We can infer that they are
strangers from the way they proceed with extreme caution
and test each other’s social boundaries while dancing
delicately around the taboo subject of the woman’s
weight. The scene’s lifelike credibility is engaging
while its interpersonal intrigue builds with tinier and
tinier steps to an increasingly higher level of tension.
Intrigue draws us into the world of a play; credibility
keeps us there. In the best plays the two are sustained
in a fine tension of opposites: intrigue demands
surprise, credibility demands consistency. Combined,
they generate a kind of “believable wonder,” which is
the fundamental state of drama. Credibility alone will
not suffice to make a play interesting, and no level of
intrigue can make a noncredible play palatable. The
integration of the two must be created by the playwright
in order to transcend our expectations but not
our credulity.
SPEAKABILITY, STAGEABILITY,
AND FLOW
The dialogue of drama is written upon the page, but it must
be spoken by actors and staged by directors. Thus the goal
of the dramatist is to fabricate actable, stageable dialogue
that flows in a progression leading to theatrical impact.
One of the most common faults of beginning playwrights
is that their lines lack speakability. This is not to
say that dramatic dialogue must resemble ordinary speech.
No one imagines people in life speaking like characters
out of the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, or Shaw, or
even contemporary writers like Tom Stoppard or Caryl
Churchill. Brilliantly styled language is a feature of most of
the great plays in theatre history, and lifelikeness, by itself,
is not a dramatic virtue—nor is its absence a dramatic fault.
Speakability means that a line of dialogue should
achieve its maximum impact when spoken. To accomplish
this, the playwright must be closely attuned to the shape of
dialogue: the rhythm of sound that creates emphasis, meaning,
focus, and power. Verbal lullabies and climaxes, fast
punch lines, sonorous lamentations, sparkling epigrams,
devastating expletives, pregnant pauses, and electrifying
whispers—these are some of the devices of dialogue that
impart audial shape to great plays written by master dramatists.
Look, for example, at Andrew Undershaft’s chiding
of his pretentious son, Stephen, in George Bernard Shaw’s
Major Barbara, where Stephen has just said that he knows
“the difference between right and wrong.”
UNDERSHAFT: You don’t say so! What! no capacity for
business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art,
no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge
of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers,
baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business,
and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and
wrong. Why, man, you’re a genius, a master of masters,
a god! At twenty-four, too!
No one would call this “everyday speech.” It’s a far cry
from the Neil LaBute dialogue quoted earlier. But it is
immensely speakable and its cascading rhythm develops
a momentum that leaves Stephen speechless and, with a
great actor delivering it, the audience breathless.
Speakability also requires that the spoken line appear to
realistically emanate from the character who utters it. The
words should stem from the character’s personality, not just
the author’s perspective. Actors use their lines to develop
characterizations and the script helps create an overall style
for an acting ensemble. Thus the mastery of dramatic dialogue
demands more than an impressive vocabulary—it
requires a constant awareness of the purposes and tactics
underlying human communication, as well as of the multiple
psychological and aesthetic properties of language.