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

70 Chapter 4 The Playwright
to include. A person who can recollect personal experiences
in great detail, who can conjure up convincing
situations, peoples, locales, and conversations, and who
is closely attuned to nuance can work these talents into
the creation of plays.
DEPTH OF CHARACTERIZATION
Depth of characterization presents perhaps the greatest
single stumbling block for novice playwrights, who
tend either to write all characters “in the same voice”
(normally the author’s own) or to divide them into two
camps: good characters and bad. Capturing the depth,
complexities, and uniqueness of real human beings, even
seemingly ordinary human beings, is a difficult task.
Depth of characterization requires that every character
possess an independence of intention, expression, and
motivation. Moreover, these characteristics must appear
sensible in the light of our general knowledge of psychology
and human behavior. In plays as in life, all characters
must act from motives that appear reasonable to them (if
not to those watching them or to those affected by them).
The writer should bear in mind that every character is, to
himself or herself, an important and worthwhile person,
regardless of what other people think. Thus even the great
villains of drama—Shakespeare’s Richard III, Claudius,
and Iago, for example—must believe in themselves and
in the fundamental “rightness” of their causes. Even if
we never completely understand their deepest motivations
(as we can’t fully understand the motives of real
villains such as Hitler, Caligula, or John Wilkes Booth),
we should be able to sense at the bottom of any character’s
behavior a validity of purpose, however twisted or
perverse we may find it.
Playwrights who frequently write in a realistic
vein—Chekhov, Williams, Miller, and the like—
have provided many works in which the psychological
dimensions of their characters dominate all other
aspects of the theatrical experience. Look, for example,
at this speech of Big Mama in Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:
BIG MAMA: [outraged that her son-in-law, Gooper, is offering
her a written trusteeship plan which would give him and
his wife control over the estate of Big Daddy, Mama’s
ailing husband] Now you listen to me, all of you, you
listen here! They’s not goin’ to be any more catty talk in
my house! And Gooper, you put that away before I grab
it out of your hand and tear it right up! I don’t know what
the hell’s in it, and I don’t want to know what the hell’s in
it. I’m talkin’ in Big Daddy’s language now; I’m his wife,
not his widow, I’m still his wife! And I’m talkin’ to you in
his language an’—
Williams has brilliantly crafted Big Mama’s rage with
aggressive verbs (“grab,” “tear”), local vernacular
(“they’s”), clause repetitions (“I’m his wife . . . I’m still
his wife”), loaded adjectives (“catty”), profanities rare
for a southern woman (“hell”), contractions (“goin,’”
“talkin’”), and individual word emphases as marked by
italics. But he has also undermined her rage by having
her admit to assuming her husband’s vocabulary—so
that while she states that she’s not Big Daddy’s widow,
her language indicates she knows, even if only unconsciously,
that it will soon be otherwise.
GRAVITY AND PERTINENCE
Gravity and pertinence are terms used to describe the
importance of a play’s theme and its overall relevance
to the concerns of the intended audience. To say a play
has gravity is to say simply that its central theme is one
of serious and lasting significance in humanity’s spiritual,
moral, or intellectual life. The greatest dramas—comedies
as well as tragedies—are always concerned with universal
problems—aging, discord, regret, insecurity, rejection,
loss—for which we continually seek greater lucidity.
Gravity does not mean somberness, however; it requires
only a confrontation with the most elemental tasks of living.
When an audience truly understands and identifies
with a play’s experiences, even the darkest tragedy radiates
power and illumination.
Look, for example, at Bynum’s speech in August
Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Bynum is what
Wilson calls a rootworker (conjuror). A younger man,
Jeremy, has just praised a woman as knowing “how
to treat a fellow,” and Bynum chastises him for his
shallowness:
You just can’t look at it like that. You got to look at the
whole thing. Now, you take a fellow go out there, grab
hold to a woman and think he got something ’cause
she sweet and soft to the touch. It’s in the world like
everything else. Touching’s nice. It feels good. But
you can lay your hand upside a horse or a cat, and
that feels good too. What’s the difference? When you
grab hold to a woman, you got something there. You
got a whole world there. You got a way of life kicking
up under your hand. That woman can take and make
you feel like something. I ain’t just talking about in
the way of jumping off into bed together and rolling
around with each other. Anybody can do that. When
you grab hold to that woman and look at the whole
thing and see what you got . . . why she can take and
make something of you. Your mother was a woman.
That’s enough right there to show you what a woman
is. Enough to show you what she can do. She made
something out of you.