Building Your Play:  Theory And Practice For The Beginning Playwright, by David Rush

Plays can be a hard genre to pull off, in large part because of the stark limitations that exist when one is trying to stage material.  Many people who write dramas, and I must include myself in this, are far more interested in playing to the page and making literary plays than in creating material that is compelling to stage and in having a firm understanding of what needs to be done to make a compelling play.  This is, in other words, a book that is not only useful for those who are beginning as playwrights but those who have written plays and may need a reminder or two about what it is that makes drama compelling so that they can make better plays than they have made before.  Whatever category of reader you are, whether someone who is interested in writing plays or someone who wants a better understanding of the structure of plays as someone who appreciates watching them or acting in them, this book has a lot to offer and makes for an interesting read that really focuses on the fundamentals of playwriting, and that is a worthwhile thing.

This book begins with acknowledgements and an introduction that states the book’s purposes and intended audience.  After that the author provides a look at the fundamentals of plays (I), asking the question of what it is that makes a play (1), the four keys of involving somebody who urgently wants something that is hard to get and who does what is necessary to get it (2), and discussing the goals (3), obstacles (4), and strategies (5) of the various characters in plays.  The author then provides some tips on how one can put these fundamentals together (II) in order to master a compelling overall plot (6) as well as the miniplays that exist within scenes where all of these elements can take place (7) and the dramatic questions that are asked and then answered by the playwright through the course of the drama (8).  Finally, the author provides some advanced tricks (III) in how to write plays better, which have names such as the pigeon sister (9), a situation that allows characters to interact meaningfully with each other, the exposition pig (10), which is a bad way of providing exposition, as well as various miscellaneous tricks (11) and suggestions for characterization (12), after which there is an epilogue on revisions and a glossary and index.

Taking the material of this book, can one build a good play?  Yes, absolutely.  This is a book that is based on fundamentals in terms of structures and strategies and elements that are easy to manage.  The techniques that the author urges are ones that can be easily done, and that can create not only good plays, but the firm basis of much longer series of works if one chooses to write sagas, as some of us are prone to do.  For example, writing biographies of characters and thinking in great detail about the lives of the people we write about can give us the food for a lot more than just a single play.  It is not that the author is looking to help people write one play, but to build their entire world in which they can deal with the interaction of various people and with consistent themes and approaches and determine not only what their characters want, but that which they most desperately need to convey to a world where communication is a struggle and where it is hard to let others know what we are feeling or even to trust that people will be interested in helping us to achieve our difficult quests of life.