For Those About to Playwrite

A Suggestion for Those Just Starting in Dramatic Writing Programs

Content Note: Mentions of all kinds of weird and disturbing sexual assault, violent, controversial, and taboo topics in this one. Nothing you wouldn’t read about in a Theater Studies class or writing workshop, but maybe not something you want to read about right now. And that’s fine!

Hello, young writers! You are at college now! It’s exciting, isn’t it? And probably also terrifying! You have the freedom to create whatever you want. This is the time for you to try out some new ideas. But I would like to give you a word of advice, based on my six years of art school (two in high school, four in college).

You really don’t need to write a play about incest.

There’s always at least one person in the class who does it. They’re nearly always an only child. They’re never a survivor working something out (which I’d never tell someone not to do), they’re someone wanting to be seen as original. They always include it as a big revelation near the end, one that adds nothing to the rest of the story. After the girl’s drug overdose or the boy’s murder, it’s revealed that the young lovers were actually… SISTER AND BROTHER?!

I don’t know why this always happens. And it’s not just incest! (Damn, there’s a disturbing sentence.) There are myriad other taboo subjects your peers will be tempted to write about—I’ve lost count of how many times I read plays or sketches about cannibalism, for one. Sometimes it’s just a controversial issue: I don’t know what it is, but college students love to write about abortion. And yet, it’s almost never written about in a political way, that is to say, a morality tale about why abortion should remain legal, or why it shouldn’t. Instead, it’s used to show that a character is evil (usually because they tried to force their partner to get one), or joked about in an “edgy” way, or just used to heighten stakes. There’s never much consideration of what it actually is. It’s just a hot-button issue, so it’s a good attention-getter.

And that’s part of the issue: you might want an attention-getter. You’ll likely be worried your writing or imagery can’t stand on its own. You gotta get a gimmick, and the gimmick is a hot topic, or, you know, incest or patricide or fratricide or infanticide or mutilation or any of the other things you’re reading about in Theater History. Actually, that’s probably a major contributor to this: you’ll be wading through the mire of The Oedipus Cycle or The Oresteia or Senecan tragedies, so you’ll be absorbing all this subconsciously. (Maybe at some point you’ll actually take a day to focus on something other than Western Theater History and you’ll get to watch that Kabuki play where a long-lost, seemingly amnesiac fox spirit is drawn to a drum made of its parents’ skins? I thought that was very sweet!) Kind of hard not to think of the worst things humanity does when you’re writing essays on it every week.

But you can also just learn your own voice. Writing workshops, in my opinion, are safe spaces. I don’t mean in the way that conservative pundits, or former comedians who mostly just complain these days rather than actually do comedy, mean “safe space.” I mean a place for you to experiment. “Everything we write in here will suck,” my playwriting teacher Jeni said on the first day, and she was right. Everything we wrote did suck, at first. Then we talked about it, and did rewrites—which I was shocked to learn could just mean re-writing a single line; I did that for the first play I ever wrote and it changed the story completely—and read them again, and learned how to give feedback, and suddenly they didn’t suck so much anymore. Some of them were even really good.

Even if you don’t think you are writing about yourself, you are, in some small way, writing about yourself. Fiction is often way more revealing than nonfiction. You can still be a good person and write about disturbing things, of course. Maybe you want to write something darker because you have trauma you think it would be cathartic to write about. Sometimes your characters will just lead you to strange places. But for the love of Aeschylus, Kālidāsa, and Izumo no Okuni, you don’t need to write the grossest, edgiest thing to stand out.

Then again, I started writing my first produced play when I was 20, and it had references to the War on Terror, underage drug and alcohol use, suicide, abortion, statutory rape, and satanism. So what the hell do I know?

Fake BBC Show of the Week: Death and Mrs. Purley