My wife Maria-Beatriz and I see a lot of theatre at all levels, from rough-draft readings to the finished-off product. I also participate in two writing groups, and I always solicit scripts from people to read if I cannot be at a performance or a reading so that I can drop in a couple of pennies' worth of response.
Now, I don't know if what I want to talk about is a "trend" (I doubt it -- "slipshodishness" is probably as timeless as bad taste), but I notice quite often that writers do not do their "homework" to anchor the script in the reality they are trying to present. And this really irritates me because it violates something that I learn more and more strongly each day I write my theatre: except for perhaps dance, theatre is the art form most dependent upon "embodiment," that is, making the word flesh, turning flesh into words, and setting this all in a concrete and considered multi-dimensional universe sluicing through real time.
An example. A fellow writer and I recently had scripts done in a local festival of short works. Her piece had three characters: a child (11 years of age or so, played by an adult), a child psychologist, and a police detective. The story involved the use of the child as bait by a woman (spoken about by not presented on the stage) to lure men to robbery and their deaths. The detective wanted to just whack a confession out of the child, but the psychologist felt it important to heal the wounds caused by the violence.
The play stretched credulity in a number of directions, but what aggravated me most of all was the complete lack of attention to the details of interviewing a child in such a situation. Maria-Beatriz, who is a social worker in a prominent children's hospital in Boston, squirmed in her seat as she saw every rule and practice violated for the sake of dramatic effect. And, in the end, what dramatic effect the play had was undermined by the inattention to detail because the effect was earned under a false flag. If the playwright had been more aware of how psychologists and police officers have to handle a child (especially in the wake of witch-hunts like the McMartin case), the play would have had to proceed in a completely different way and achieve its ends in a more coherent fashion. The writer failed to ground the play in the reality that it offered as the central argument, and because of that, the writer could not say anything that had the feel of truth to it.
This is primarily a lack of attention to "process," to understanding the syntax of how certain parts of the world process the world. In this play not only was the psychologist completely out of line in leaving the child alone with the detective so that he could question her but also the detective had no clue about how to proceed so that the evidence/confession he wanted to extract would withstand the efforts of a defense attorney to get it thrown out of court. It's as if the playwright said, "Who needs all this boring detail? I want to shock them, disturb them, whack them between the eyes!" As if queasiness equated to truth. Nope.
Another kind of "process" homework that often does not get done involves simple physics. One play read in our workshop involved a man, gut-shot, dying in the bathtub where he fell after being shot by a woman handcuffed to the pipes of a sink. (They are in a cabin where he has taken her as a hostage after a botched robbery -- she somehow managed to get the gun while he was taking a shower because he had inadvertently left it within reach. Hmm......) When first read, almost 100% of the questions had to do with the layout of the bathroom, how long was the chain on the handcuffs, where did he put the gun down, and so on. In short, a slew of questions about physics because the layout of the theatrical world did not match the listeners' experience of their own Newtonian world. The playwright responded that she hadn't thought about this (!), and that in the end, it didn't matter -- she just wanted to know what our emotional response was to the situation.
Well, we couldn't have an emotional response because the questions about floor plans and ballistics and what-not created a static that edged out considering the conflict of the characters. And to top it off, the end of the play involves the man (who is black) splashing bloody water on the woman (who is white) after informing her that he has AIDS. (The race stuff was simply dropped in to pump up the volume -- it was immaterial to the core of the play.) She responds as if she had contracted AIDS as soon as the first droplet struck her skin. Now, even the most cursory reading of how to prevent AIDS (say, perusing a poster on the subway) will tell you that the biology just does not work that way. Yet the climax of the play depended upon his contamination of her as a revenge for what she did to him. In other words, the pay-off depended on a falsity, and when that happens, the only proper response is "No way!" and out the exit.
Inattention to historical detail is often another area where playwrights do not anchor themselves strongly enough. For example, another fellow playwright wrote a piece based on the lives of prostitutes in the Yukon during the gold rush in Alaska. I suspect that she had not read deeply into the history of the era or the lives of the characters she wanted to portray because what we in the audience got was "mellerdrama": the bad-ass madam with the heart of gold, the young ravished virgin toughened by the world, and so on. The dramatic action of the play then became the playwright shuffling around the stereotypes to create an appearance of conflict, resolution, etc. At no point was there room in the piece for the audience to sit inside another completely-realized world and contend with characters who themselves had lives in back of them and uncertainty ahead. Instead, the audience got to watch figures move across a diorama, which would never be mistaken for the real landscape of place, time, and biography.
This is not to say that a play using history for its foundation needs to be true to every historical detail because the play, in the end, is not about the details. A history play, as Derek Walcott points out, is really about the history of one's own historical time and place -- playwrights simply use details and contexts from another era to comment upon their own. (Think of Shakespeare's "history" in his "history" plays.) But if playwrights do not do enough homework to know the details of the past, all they can then rely upon is the limited book of their own self-history (and none of us is rich enough to substitute our lives for an age). Then the play is not about the history of a time but the much shorter history of a personal biography, and what the audience gets is "This is my idea of what a madam of that time might say and do" rather than "This is what a madam said and did, based on her diary, and here is how I have filtered it to say something about how women are still 'prostituted' in a number of ways today" -- or something like that, to make the history of the play both honored in its own complexity and resonant with those in the audience. One needs to soak oneself in the historical details so that what comes out is unconsciously tinged with their presence; otherwise, it is just a matter of posture and gesture.
A third area of inattention that really annoys me is when a playwright does not think like a director and an audience member. So many of my fellow playwrights think that the writing comes first, that what they say (through the mouthpieces of their characters) is what the play is all about. This means that we listeners have to wade through bogs of "tawk" that have little to do with theatre. To me, a playwright, like a choreographer, is a sculptor of space and time. I do not understand how a playwright can write a play without having a stage in one's head, a virtual director shaping the action, and a mental audience responding because what characters say influences what they do, and what they do shapes what they say, and where they say and do it on stage (in relation to themselves and others) bends the gravity of time and place in certain ways and not in certain other ways, and all of this mix and flux is what makes theatre theatrical. If a playwright wants to just write dialogue, then he or she should write a radio play. But to create "theatre" is to think in 3-D all the time, to be always be dialectical and cosmological (every play is a solar system of interacting gravities).
The real sin of not paying attention to process is to make your audience pay attention to irrelevancies. The play goes along, and all of a sudden this detail pops up that the audience member just knows is not right, and that detail sticks like a burr in the brain, and then there is no way to draw the audience member back into the dream of the play. At the very least, getting the mechanics and physics right means that the audience will not be sitting there distracted by cockleburrs in their cortexes as the actors emote away.
But even more importantly, detail is a syntax, giving order to the elements that make up the "conversation" we call a play. Detail builds texture and "thing-ness," and humans, even the cyberized ones now umbilicaled to cell phones and internets, crave the comfort of embodiment for their three-dimensioned bodies. Now, syntax can always be broken if the purpose is, through the sabotage, to bring the audience to new or unexpected imaginings -- think James Joyce or Shakespeare's "barbarian" energies. But if the syntax is broken through ineptitude or ignorance, then all we have are shards that bruise. Do the homework, and the work will most certainly bring the audience to home.
(February 2001)