
Colleen Murphy is an award-winning playwright, an actor, editor, director and an opera librettist. Somehow, she manages to find time to teach the art of scriptwriting. I sat down with Colleen for a discussion about the similarities and differences between fiction and drama.
Litguru: At first glance, playwriting seems simpler than fiction because the writer needs to work only on dialogue. But then that is harder that it seems.
Colleen: It is harder than it seems because the dialogue must contain the character, the action, the subtext, as well as highlight what is not spoken. In drama the notion of action does not necessarily mean characters running around on stage, but rather it is the intention of a character and what that character wants from another character whose intention may be entirely different. Drama is action and re-action on an emotional, psychological and physical plane…and that action lives in the dialogue and in the silence between the dialogues. Drama creates collisions and collisions create conflict, which is the most important feature of drama.
Litguru: The ‘show don’t tell’ applies to both genres but in plays, the showing is through the dialogue. Correct?
Colleen: Yes and no. The showing is through the action of the language and how the action affects another character. I believe good drama allows an audience to watch characters make decisions and often audiences are party to why the characters made those decisions. That process invites us, the audience, to experience something of the human condition.
The ‘showing’ is also done through structure. How a dramatist shapes the container that expresses the play is extremely important to the ‘showing’.
Litguru: Can an argument be made that in good fiction also the dialogue shows rather than tells?
Colleen: Absolutely. Reading good fiction puts the reader inside the action and into the middle of the conflict. I read a lot of fiction and often feel that I am inside the story with the characters and do not want to leave them. The same is true of good drama. Even though I sit in the audience I still feel I am in the middle of the conflict and if it gets disturbing or unbearable, I may want to leave but am riveted to my seat because I want to know what is going to happen.
‘Telling’ distances readers and audiences, whereas ‘showing’ invites readers and audiences into the story. If a writer tells me something rather than lets me experience it, I feel cheated. The same applies to drama.
Litguru: In plays the characters don’t speak like real life. They are allowed or need to speak with a richness and eloquence that we rarely see in fiction.
Colleen: Yes and no. What does ‘real life talk’ sound like? Sometimes it is banal beyond belief, other times it is stunningly strange and poetic. It depends on the situation people find themselves in or characters are placed in. Playwrights usually put a charge under their characters which heightens the way their characters speak. This charge lets characters to speak in metaphor or allows subtext to reveal the powerful unconscious at work. Language is everything in theatre…it is the conjuring stick, conjuring up character, conjuring up action and conjuring up image.
Litguru: In fiction, because the reader does not see which actor is speaking, we have to write dialogue such that the reader knows who is speaking even without a tagline. This need to distinguish character voices, it seems to me, is less important in a play. Comment.
Colleen: Yes and no again. Playwrights have the luxury of live actors living in real time in three dimensional spaces to deliver their words to an audience, and actors contribute hugely to a character’s voice and personality, but all the same, each character should have a distinct voice, or rather a distinct rhythm to their language, and a distinct speech pattern. This enables characters to reveal themselves through their choice of language.
Litguru: The main difference, it seems to me, is that fiction has more flexible with time. We use flashbacks and flash forwards. We use memory and fantasy. We can leap great many years within a story. Plays need immediacy; moment to moment unfolding.
Colleen: The stage is an unlimited, timeless, borderless space. The past can be brutally immediate on stage. Sometime a play can swing from past to present to future in a blink of an eye, or travel backwards in time. That said I believe fiction can accomplish two things that stage cannot; it can stretch time, and it can fully render interior monologue. But theatre can accomplish moment-to-moment, in real time, like no other medium except perhaps dance.
Litguru: You have said that playwriting is as hard an art form as poetry. But poetry is probably the easiest to get published. Most literary magazines have room for poetry, but plays rarely are printed in literary journals.
Is there an editorial bias? Do readers prefer short fiction, essays and poems, photographs but not plays on the printed page?
Colleen:Â There is no editorial bias at all, there is only the reality that poems are short and plays are loooooong. Even one act plays are loooong.
However, all this may change when magazines go digital.
Litguru: At Descant I can only recall once seeing a play submitted in our slushpile. Do playwrights not believe magazines will print excerpts?
Colleen: Magazines, with the exception of those directly catering to theatre like the Canadian Theatre Review, do not normally publish plays or excerpts. Their interested reading public is limited, the plays and even an excerpt are often considered too long, particularly now in the age of one-word communication. A lot of people do not know how to read a play. Generally they see plays in the theatre so it does not occur to them that they can read the play if it has been published.
As past president of the Board of Playwrights Canada Press, a niche house that publishes exclusively Canadian Drama, I believe that a published play is as much a part of the literature of this country as any novel. The Press and other small houses that publish drama are constantly finding new ways to make published plays available to the academic, theatrical and literary communities.
Litguru: In Canada, novels have been turned into operas (Handmaiden’s Tale) but not plays. In the UK they seem to have more crossover. What can we do to encourage a crossover?
Colleen: I know of two Canadian plays that are being adapted into opera and that is encouraging. Operas are very, very expensive to develop and mount and that is a determining factor in terms of what material is chosen. The opera companies in Canada are starting to embrace new work, while smaller, more innovative companies, like Tapestry New Opera Works, continue to stimulate and encourage young composers and librettists.
Litguru: Which works of fiction, in your opinion, have the most potential for a theatrical treatment?
Colleen: Works that have the most potential for theatrical treatment are works that contain character development, conflict, and also contain exterior monologue or dialogue, as well as fiction that does not have much exposition but a lot of emotional action.
Litguru: Would you recommend all fiction writers to study some playwriting?
Colleen: Yes, but only if they are curious or interested in incorporating dramatic elements like tension, into their fiction, or if they wish to work more exclusively with dialogue. Certainly fiction writers should read plays as much as playwrights read novels…and most of the playwrights I know love reading novels.
Litguru: You will be teaching playwriting where in the next few months?
Colleen: May 9 and 10, 2009: Master Class for Alberta Playwrights Network,
June 30 – July 5, 2009: Great Blue Heron Writing Workshop, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish
October 22 – 25, 2009: Master Class & Keynote Speaker, Playworks Ink 2009, Calgary
October 15, 2009 – March 4, 2010: Playwriting Master Class, University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies, Toronto