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

Theatre 67
Simon Russell Beale (seated at left) chats eloquently with Hayley Atwell as his daughter, Major Barbara, as both are surrounded
by equally well-spoken friends and family in George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 Major Barbara, directed by Nicholas Hytner at
England’s National Theatre in 2008. © Geraint Lewis
Stageability, of course, requires that dialogue be written
so it can be spoken effectively upon a stage, but it requires
something more: dialogue must be conceived as an integral
element of a particular staged situation in which setting,
physical acting, and spoken dialogue are inextricably combined.
A stageable script is one in which staging and stage
business—as well as design and the acting demands—are
neither adornments for the dialogue nor sugar-coating for
the writer’s opinions but are intrinsic to the very nature
of the play. Like credibility, stageability is different than
“realism.” Suzan-Lori Parks (see the section “A Sampling
of Current American Playwrights” later in this chapter)
creates brilliantly stageable works, but the worlds of her
plays are nothing we would encounter in real life; the opening
stage directions of her America Play are “A great hole.
In the middle of nowhere.” One hundred different directors
could come up with one hundred different interpretations
of that description, but the physical results would all reflect
the more abstract truths that her play evokes—absence, history,
amnesia, and trauma.
Both speakability and stageability are contingent
upon the limitations of the actors and directors as well
as those of the audience. Speakability must take into
account that the actor must breathe from time to time,
for example, and that the audience can take in only so
many metaphors in a single spoken sentence. Stageability
must reckon with the physical forces of gravity
and inertia—and in many cases modest budgets—which
the poet and the novelist may conveniently ignore. The
playwright need not simply succumb to the common
denominator but still must not forget that the theatre
is fundamentally a human event that cannot transcend
human capabilities.
A speakable and stageable script flows rather than
stumbles. Flow requires a continual stream of information,
and a play that flows is one that is continually saying something,
doing something, and meaning something to the
audience. To serve this end, the playwright should address
such technical problems as scene-shifting, entrances and
exits, and act breaks as early as possible in the scriptwriting
process. In drafting scenes, the writer should avoid exposition
for its own sake: an old maxim of writing and acting
still holds true today: “show, don’t tell.” Rather than have a
character say “as your older brother, who once saved your
life back when we lived in Oklahoma, I’m disappointed by
your recent decision to divorce your wife,” try to have this
information emerge organically in the natural behavior of
the characters. Leaden exposition and incomprehensible
plot developments can sink the sturdiest script in a sea of
audience apathy.