I’m weird. I write pretty good plays with good dialogue. Well, actually, with some work-shopping, I write pretty awesome plays. They are usually poignant, timely, and funny as heck. Even the serious parts are funny, at least till the audience members go home and think about it. And that is just what I want. I want folks to go home and think about what they saw and heard. The lines that they split a gut laughing about. Nearly peed my pants they’d say. At least that’s what I hope they do after seeing one of my plays. I hope they can have a good night out, a good belly laugh or two. Even if they just chuckle or let a smile crack their face. And if they never think about it again, that’s o.k. too. If I can’t make them laugh, then I’ll have to try harder on my next play.
Plays are so darn fun to write. They are quick. No setting to describe. Just, interior. Kitchen. Table with 2 chairs. And then away I go. Putting words in my characters’ mouths. Action to reaction. Moving them from scene to scene. Tripping the protagonist with pitfalls, barriers, and bumps in the road. All surmountable with a little help from me, the playwright, who provides the dialogue and props for all, including the antagonists.
You know what the weird part is? It’s me. I only want to be a playwright. I don’t care about sitting in on the casting calls, walk-throughs, rehearsals. I just want to write the plays. The directors, producers, actors, makeup and wardrobe can do what they like. I wrote the play, their job is to put it on stage.
Why don’t I want to see my play from paper through to stage? Because I’m a novelist at heart. Novelists can’t look over the shoulder of their readers. Explain all the innuendos and story arcs like a talking end note. We can’t pop out of the page like an animated dropped capital, playing a YouTube video of the author explaining what she really meant. Maybe someday this will happen, but not at this present moment in 2014. In this present moment I’ll keep writing playwrighting and working on writing a play into a novel.
