Writing for Stage and Screen: Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience 1350338273, 9781350338272

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Works for Stage and Screen Referenced in This Book
Preface
1 Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them
2 The Perception Shift
3 Theatre Is a Rhyme for Life
4 Story and Plot
5 Choice and Consequence
6
In Retrospect, Inevitable
7
Convergence
Acknowledgments
Notes
Preface
1 Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them
2 The Perception Shift
3 Theatre Is a Rhyme for Life
4 Story and Plot
5 Choice and Consequence
6 In Retrospect, Inevitable
7 Convergence
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Writing for Stage and Screen

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INTRODUCTIONS TO THEATRE Series Editor: Jim Volz, California State University, Fullerton, USA

This series of textbooks provides a practical introduction to core areas of theatre and performance, and has been designed to support semester teaching plans. Each book offers case studies and international examples of practice, and will equip undergraduate students and emerging theatre professionals with the understanding and skills necessary to succeed— whether in study or in the entertainment industry. Directing Professionally: A Practical Guide to Developing a Successful Career in Today’s Theatre Kent Thompson ISBN 978-1-4742-8876-7 Get the Job in the Entertainment Industry: A Practical Guide for Designers, Technicians, and Stage Managers Kristina Tollefson ISBN 978-1-3501-0378-8 Introduction to the Art of Stage Management: A Practical Guide to Working in the Theatre and Beyond Michael Vitale ISBN 978-1-4742-5720-6 Introduction to Arts Management Jim Volz ISBN 978-1-4742-3978-3 The Art of Scenic Design: A Practical Guide to the Creative Process Robert Mark Morgan ISBN 978-1-3501-3954-1 The Art of Writing for the Theatre: An Introduction to Script Analysis, Criticism and Playwriting Luke Yankee ISBN 978-1-3501-5557-2

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Writing for Stage and Screen Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience Sherry Kramer

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METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Sherry Kramer, 2023 Sherry Kramer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. 207–8 constitute an extension of this copyright page. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge Oscar Lee Brownstein and Steve Moore for permission to include their work in this volume. Cover design by www.ironicitalics.com Cover image: Calista Flockhart in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles (Photograph © Jeff Lorch) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-3827-2 PB: 978-1-3503-3826-5 ePDF: 978-1-3503-3829-6 eBook: 978-1-3503-3828-9 Series: Introductions to Theatre Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For my parents

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Contents

List of Illustrations  xii Works for Stage and Screen Referenced in This Book  xiii Preface  xvii

1 Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them  1 First We Must Find a Way to See the World in Front of Us  3 Frame as Constant Invitation  4 There Is an Old Saying in the Theatre: The First Twenty Minutes Are Free  6 A Closer Look at the First Twenty Minutes  7 Exercise: Tracking the First Twenty Minutes  9 Some Advice about the First Twenty Minutes  10 Tone  11 There Is Always a Clock  13 Exercise: Spend Some Time with Structured Time  16 Attention  17

2 The Perception Shift  19 Insight: The Eureka Moment  21 Attention and Insight  23 The Power of a Moment’s Newness  25 How Newness Drives Insight  27 A Joke Is a Small Play  28 The Perception Shift in Three Plays  34 Exercise: Experience a Small Perception Shift in the Comfort of Your Own Home  37 Hiding in Plain Sight  37

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3 Theatre Is a Rhyme for Life  43 Certainty, Meaning, and Maybe  44 Dramatic Doubleness  48 The Bone Violin  49 Exercise: Track Doubling in The Bone Violin  52 Doubleness Is Our Most Elegant Tool  53 Three Surfaces of Doubleness  54 A Play Within a Play Is Structural Doubleness  60 Systems  62 Systems in Six Timebound Works of Art  63 Pleats  71 Exercise: Pleating  72 System and Theme  73 Exercise: Tracking Systems in A Streetcar Named Desire  75 Tone Shifts  76 Doubleness and How Endings Tend to Mirror Their Beginnings  78 A Play Is Made Out of Itself, Over and Over  80 Empathy and Doubleness  81

4 Story and Plot  83 Sequence = Meaning  84 Exercise: Order Makes Meaning  84 Breadcrumbs  85 Story Is Another Word for Time  86 How Timebound Art Organizes Itself Outside of Story  87 Betrayal  88 Futurity  90 The Double Track of Time  91 Plot and Story Are Two Different Things  92 Exercise: How Your Plot Uses Story  94 Anticlimax  95 Conveniences  96 To Sum Up Story versus Plot  97 And so Here We Are. We Are Ready to Talk about the Enchantment That Is Story  97

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Contents

Vertical and Horizontal  99 Vertical versus Horizontal  100 Exercise: Draw Two Sets  101

5 Choice and Consequence  103 Why Choice Matters to the Audience  104 Action as Character  105 The And Then, the So Then, and the What If  106 Writing Exercise: The And Then, the So Then  106 Repeatability  108 Choice versus Reveal  111 Secret versus Mystery  111 Withholding  112 Writing Exercise: Adapt a Family Story  113 A Tragedy Is Like Going Down a River  114 Breaking Bad  116 Writing Exercise: A Five-Minute Scene about Choice  117 Right versus Right  117 Tragedy Is a Clash of Values  118 Will  119 Tragedy Is Made Out of Hope  120 Hope as Strategy  120 Writing Exercise: The Nodes  122 Tragedy, the Moral Artform  122 Characters Don’t Change in a Drama No Matter How Much They Want To, No Matter How Much We Hope They Will  123 In Comedy, People Change  124 The Magic of Changing Without Changing  126 Exercise: Find Comedies Where People Change  127 But It Feels Like Someone Changes in Plays and Movies That Aren’t Comedies. Are You Sure Someone Doesn’t Change?  128 But If People Can’t Change, How Do We Change?  128 Characters and Tone  130 Writing Exercise: One Choice, Three Points of View  132

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6 In Retrospect, Inevitable  133 In Retrospect, Inevitable Outcomes  134 Not in Retrospect, Inevitable Outcomes  134 Writing Exercise: Write the Last Forty-Five Seconds of Your Movie or Play as a Sonnet  137 Pointers  137 The Seven Attributes of Pointers  138 Pointers Are Lies That Tell the Truth  140 Pointers and Perception Shifts  142 Pointers versus Systems  144 How Pointers Announce Themselves  145 The Power of Surprise When It Isn’t Surprising  149 How to Write Pointers on Purpose  150 Foreshadowing and Misdirection  151 The Atomic Throw Is an Uncertain Kitchen  152 Your Best Title Is Always a Pointer  155 Exercise: Finding Your Title  156 How Music Orchestrates Tone  156 Running Gags  158 A Play Always Tells the Truth, But It Enjoys Using Lies to Tell It  160 Exercise: Lies  161 Spoilers  162 Preloads  164 Exercise: Identifying Pointers  166 Recognizing Pointers in Your Own Work  167

7 Convergence  169 It’s Never a Single Moment  169 Exercise: The End and the Beginning  171 Is Saying That Convergence Is Everywhere in a Great Work of Timebound Art the Same Thing as Saying That a Great Work of Timebound Art Is All Convergence?  172 Satisfying versus Meaningful  174 The Turn  174 Exercise: Noticing Perception Shifts  176

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Convergence and Reveal  176 Enlarging the Idea of Dramatic Event  177 Writing Exercise: The Dramatic Future  179 The Difference between What Happens on Stage or Screen and What Happens in the Audience  179 Why a Perception Shift Makes Things Weightless  180 Writing Exercise: The Last Forty-Five Seconds, Again  182 How Coincidence Is a Form of Rhyme  182 Open Endings  183 How Meaning Is Made or Waylaid  184 Mysteries Are Almost All Writers’ Favorite Genre for a Reason  185 The Long Arc  186 A Small Play to Fill Us with Wonder  189 New Approaches to Narrative by Steve Moore  189 Structure Is Just What Happens in the End  199 Writing Exercise: Adapt the Convergence of a Song  199 Hope Is at the Heart of Everything in Our Artform  200 Exercise: Tracking Hope  202 Once Again: The Duck Rabbit  204 The Way We Make Sense of the World Is Who We Are  205 Acknowledgments  207 Notes  209 Bibliography  213 Index  217

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Illustrations

0.1

Möbius strip  xvii

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The duck rabbit  19

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Once again: The duck rabbit  204

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Works for Stage and Screen Referenced in This Book

I have chosen the following works as examples because I believe the concepts of the perception shift are most generously revealed by them. I’ve attempted to use works in multiple chapters to reduce the reading load, but occasionally, a work is used as an example only once. I hope they will give you a solid place to stand during both the reading of Writing for Stage and Screen and the importing of its concepts into your own writing. It is not necessary to read or watch every work referenced, but certainly the ones that are used multiple times should be in order to get the most out of the book. I’ve marked them with an *. In a perfect world, you should read or watch all of the referenced works. I recommend encountering this book sequentially, because foundational concepts in early chapters prepare the reader for later ones, but I’ve listed the works in each chapter, regardless of their occurrence in earlier chapters, just in case you are one of those people who must skip ahead no matter what the cost.

Chapter 1 Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them Pirates of the Caribbean, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, and Gore Verbinski We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915, Jackie Sibblies Drury Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee *Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill *The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh *Intimate Apparel, Lynn Nottage Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire

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Works for Stage and Screen Referenced in This Book

*Fleabag (TV series), Phoebe Waller-Bridge The Clean House, Sarah Ruhl *The Piano Lesson, August Wilson An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins *A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee William

Chapter 2 The Perception Shift *Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee *The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh *A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams Slave Play, Jeremy O. Harris *The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan Wit, Margaret Edson

Chapter 3 Theatre Is a Rhyme for Life *The Bone Violin, Doug Wright The King of the Yees, Lauren Yee *A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams *Betrayal, Harold Pinter *The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh *Moonlight, Barry Jenkins *Fleabag (TV series), Phoebe Waller-Bridge *Intimate Apparel, Lynn Nottage Buried Child, Sam Shepard Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire *Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915, Jackie Sibblies Drury The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde *The Children, Lucy Kirkwood *Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill

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Works for Stage and Screen Referenced in This Book

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, Anne Washburn White Christmas, Irving Berlin, Norman Krasna, Norman Panama, Melvin Frank, and Michael Curtiz

Chapter 4 Story and Plot *Betrayal, Harold Pinter *The Piano Lesson, August Wilson *Fleabag (TV series), Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Chapter 5 Choice and Consequence *Fleabag (TV series), Phoebe Waller-Bridge *Breaking Bad, Season 1, Vince Gilligan Antigone, Sophocles *The Piano Lesson, August Wilson *Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill Woke (TV series), Keith Knight and Marshall Todd A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens Overboard, Gary Marshall and Leslie Dixon *Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill *A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

Chapter 6 In Retrospect, Inevitable *Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill The Birdcage, Elaine May and Mike Nichols The Children, Lucy Kirkwood *The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh True West, Sam Shepard *Ruined, Lynn Nottage *Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde The Peanut Butter Falcon, Tyler Nilson/Michael Schwartz The Power of the Dog, Jane Champion The Crown, Peter Morgan, Season 4, Episode 1

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Works for Stage and Screen Referenced in This Book

Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire True West, Sam Shepard

Chapter 7 Convergence The Ferryman, Jez Butterworth Arrival, Eric Heisserer and Denis Villeneuve 12 Monkeys, David Peoples, Janet Peoples, and Terry Gilliam Wit, Margaret Edson Baltimore Waltz, Paula Vogel *The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde House (watch two or three episodes), David Shore Skeleton Crew, Dominique Morisseau *A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

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Preface

Most of us think about the movement of plays and movies as a straight line, heading up at an incline—there may be some periods when the action or pace of the work slows, there may be the occasional moment of chaos when the movement of the action is uncertain, but in the end, the work generates/ is generated by a dramatic climb that arrives at a climax. But I believe that a work of timebound art is really a Möbius strip that we build inside each audience member, taking them back to where they started, changed.

Illustration 0.1  Möbius strip. Source: Robert Faires

A work of timebound art happens inside us, and so it is in our apprehension that it becomes alive and vital and complete. A play or film is a unique, self-organizing process that generates new states of order spontaneously out of nothing, with its own set of self-generated laws, like a cartoon character drawing herself. Art does things to us, and whether it does them beautifully or savagely, it does them like the above self-created cartoon character brings herself into life before us: both with our permission—we’re watching, aren’t we?—and

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without our permission: she does not/cannot ask us ahead of time how we want her miraculous appearance to affect us. Still, we surrender. We engage with an artistic event without a clear understanding of what will happen to us, but we agree to be acted upon, and so a part of us is changed. And that is what we long for, and why we are willing to pay our money and spend the treasure of our time and attention for it. We think we are drawn to the theatre because we want to see what happens to the characters before us, but that is an old-fashioned assumption about the way our artform works. When we go to the theatre, it doesn’t matter whether the characters on stage or screen change or not, as long as we do. We long to be changed by what we see. This book is an audience-centric way of looking at timebound art. What other way could there be to look at an event of meaning that happens in front of us? In the final analysis, the only thing that stays the same from play to play, movie to movie, from one screening series to the next is you. Nothing that happens on stage or screen can ever matter as much as what happens in the house—or rather, everything happens in order to make something happen in the house. The scripts we write are not the ultimate product we generate: that product is insight. Back in the 1980s, The Grateful Dead became entranced by the Tuvan throat singers, who are able to sing more than one note at a time. Our artform works by the same impossible doubleness—the work sounds a note in the actions on stage and screen and at the same time sounds a note of insight in the audience. “We’re all in the transportation business— we’re both trying to get someplace magical,” Mickey Hart of The Dead once said.1 We’re in the transportation business too. We carry the spectator into unknown territory that it turns out she recognizes. The work we create is a container that lets the audience take something about their own life home. Whether this something is a fear, or a hope, or a longing, or just a quiet desire to not feel so essentially alone, this part of their life is transformed by the experience of watching a play or movie, and then, it is returned to them at the work’s end, more whole. Less frightening. More hopeful. Sometimes redeemed. But always understood in a new way. The successes of our work are not a matter of character development or an actor’s journey or any of the craft of the art—not to the audience. They may talk about Lear’s struggle as they leave the theatre, but they have come to understand their own. They come to the theatre to discover another way of understanding what it means to be alive. At its best, it is a rehearsal. They

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see love and death on stage, and it prepares them for the great moments of their lives. This book holds thoughts and observations and ways of seeing I’ve shared over the past twenty-five years with Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate writers in the programs at The Iowa Playwrights Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, and with undergraduate writers at Bennington College. Working with these writers has been one of the great, deep delights of my life. Thank you all. It has been an honor to be your guide on part of your journey. You will find some of the concepts and words of my teacher, Oscar Lee (Okkie) Brownstein, here. He created the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa and taught me when I was there. His elegant ideas about the strategies that make a work of theatre matter to its audience were possibly the most beautiful ideas I’d ever encountered. I’d spent my life so confused about the ways that we are asked to think about plays. But his way of looking at them was a Rosetta Stone that created itself out of the unique materials that each play was made of. It transformed the way I looked at our artform. He called this Rosetta Stone the perception shift, and it is the core of his teaching and of mine. Its central, fundamental tenet: A play takes place in the audience. This book is about that. About how the place where all timebound work ultimately happens is not on stage or screen but in the eye and heart and mind of the spectator. People say there isn’t a right way or a wrong way to write a script. But actually, there is a right way to write one: the way you’re writing it. If you write it a different way, it’s a different work, created by different strategies to produce a different response inside the spectator. This book is my attempt to help you understand those strategies, to help you understand how you’re writing your play or film or streaming series. How its parts are calling to each other, how its gravity is attracting things to it, how the laws of that gravity have been generated by the world you and it created, and how you should follow those laws so you don’t get launched into space or flattened at the bottom of a gravity well. Your work is sui generis—it is of itself, and it is unique in every way. It has a DNA that you can examine, and that DNA will show you how to build more of your work so that it matches itself. Your work has organized itself, and it is its own best dramaturge. It’s my belief that if we pay the right attention to a timebound work of art, we will discover the rules that make it whole and alive. I hope that these pages can

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serve as a basket to help you carry and keep these ideas and ways of looking at our artform, and that they will be of use to you, as you make work that matters to the strangers who come to sit together in the dark or gather around a lighted screen, with questions that only a work of art can make them realize they are asking. We cannot answer all their questions, but we can help them understand that they are not alone in asking them.

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Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them The first time we see Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean, he is standing majestically on the mast of his ship, scanning the horizon. He is the picture of a brave, heroic pirate. The camera pulls back. We see that his ship is not a ship at all, but a dinghy, and it’s sinking. That heroic pose was made on a tiny mast that is barely above the water line. We immediately change our impression—he’s ludicrous, a failure, a joke. We laugh, because we see that we were wrong to believe our first impression. Captain Jack gets busy bailing. A beat later he steps off the mast onto the dock without even getting his feet wet just at the instant the dinghy disappears beneath the water. We are filled with delight—our original impression turns out to be correct— he is a winner after all. Now we really laugh—we thought one thing, then we thought another, and then we thought the first thing again, but in a surprising way. We are thrilled that he is heroic. The audience has just been taught how to view the movie. They’ve been given the template for how to progress through the entire film: Is Captain Jack Sparrow the worst pirate anyone has ever seen, or is he the best?

A question like this is always a good strategy for a template in timebound art because a question reaches ahead of its answer, and that has forward thrust. This question is especially pleasing to its audience because it is asked and answered and overturned, asked and answered and overturned, again and again. Yes, he is the best. No, he is the worst. Yes, he is the best. Each

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time this overturning happens, we get pleasure from it. This is a structural form of a running gag. It is an easy-to-follow, single-track locomotion that will gallop through the movie and carry the audience easily along for the ride. Characters will actually state the question baldly from time to time. It is the question that organizes the movie, and everything flows from it. Most importantly, of course, and part of the irresistible charm and box office success that Ted Elliott/Terry Rossio/Gore Verbinski’s Pirates had in abundance, is that the question turns out to be a truly satisfying “double” or pun. In the end, it turns out that the movie is actually asking another question entirely, a question not about the prowess or professional ability of Sparrow as a pirate but about his moral worth. Captain Jack Sparrow turns out to be a “good” pirate in every sense of the word—not only does he always come out on top, but in the end he always does the right thing. The first heroic image of him on that mast and the way that image flips or turns in our apprehension, charming and surprising us each time, is not just a pattern that teaches us how to go forward in context. It is a key to the film’s ultimate truth. It is a Rosetta Stone. Timebound works of art always offer a sort of Rosetta Stone to their audiences in the first few beats. They have to. All works of art require time to engage with them, but timebound works require that we yoke our time to the work’s time—a two-hour play or movie in a theatre must be seen in the exact same two hours that it is presented, not the way we read a book, twenty minutes here, an hour tomorrow, and without the luxury of re-watching the three minutes we just saw that we didn’t quite get on Netflix. In the theatre, those three minutes are gone. We have to get on board and stay on board. So the clock is ticking, and the sooner the audience discovers how to understand the world and navigate it, the better. A Rosetta Stone can be made of any surface—it can be candy (the humor in an Oscar Wilde play or the poetry in Tennessee Williams’s plays) that seduces an audience immediately and promises an Easter egg hunt to discover more of it. Or it can be an organizing principle (the rain scene in Paul Vogel’s Indecent or the idea of time itself in Ted Chiang/Eric Heisserer/Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival or Harold Pinter’s Betrayal). It can be the desire for justice in the everyday that blazes the path we take in the work (Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew). Sometimes, it is a specific language that takes us, like a code does, into a secret understanding of the world (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), or deeper into meaning by creating a strong metaphoric field (Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice). It can be the narrative drive that asks us to follow a line of nextness with a series of either future events or past reveals or a

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combination of both (Martin McDonagh’s plays and films). But as a rule, a Rosetta Stone is a shaped and focused combination of all the above. Each work creates its own gravitational field, its own chemical reactions, its own yes and no. Its own path of significance. And so we learn the rules of the world and we travel into that world to make the discoveries that will answer some question that we may or may not know we long to have answered. Every day, we walk around with these unknown and unanswered questions in our hearts. We go to the theatre because a work of timebound art promises secret knowledge about our lives, about the world. We are searching for meaning, for insight. We will use the work we see to generate it, and if the work does not control that process? We will make it make meaning whether it is the meaning the work of art wants us to make or not. We are all of us, artists and audience members alike, busy little meaningmaking creatures.

First We Must Find a Way to See the World in Front of Us Every work of art teaches us how to look at it, what to look for, the method by which to interpret what we see, and the nature of its unique invention and idea of value, while insinuating its primary frames of reference. But it does it in steps, in stages. This is part of its strategy. Okkie Brownstein, who headed up the Iowa Playwrights Workshop when I was there, said: [At] the opening of a play … we actively seek a primary frame of reference. Without an initial context to operate from we try and discard several framings within the first minutes … [T]‌he play may use each new bit of evidence to explode one newly formed hypothesis after another until we are comfortable that we have it right. Sometimes plays put us through that process over and over, shattering our equilibrium almost as soon as it is regained … and sometimes plays permit us to hold to a frame we have created for a considerable time, even encourage us to repress our growing discomfort with it, before they pounce.1

A frame in our art form does exactly what a frame does when placed around a painting—it creates the boundary and borders of the work. It creates the first condition of a work’s context by giving us permission to

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ignore anything that is outside the frame, and instructions on how to look at everything inside the frame’s parameters, shaping our gaze. So if a frame is so essential, why is a continuous reframing, a constant destabilization and reshaping of our gaze required in the first part of a timebound work? Wouldn’t it be more efficient and productive to establish a frame, let us get comfortable with it, and then go forward? No. Because the first thing that almost all timebound works teach an audience is this: you don’t really know what you’re seeing. Your assumptions might be built on sand. You can’t be sure that anything is what it appears to be. Sometimes we find the reframings funny, sometimes we find them distressing, sometimes they disorient us in ways we barely have a chance to register before they are gone. But every reframing has an effect on the spectator. Even after the audience is allowed to settle into a frame that seems to be valid, they will still carry the residue of the incorrect framings with them—and the net effect will be to make them wary of or sensitive to certain ways of experiencing the work. The audience is being positioned to receive the work in a way that would not be possible without the focus created by their orchestrated, incorrect assumptions. First, we thought Captain Jack Sparrow was a heroic pirate. Then we saw he was a ridiculous joke of one. Then we saw he was either brilliantly lucky or brilliant at appearing lucky when he might just be brilliant. In the first moments of the film, we are being taught that our assumptions about him are the place where our delight will be manufactured. We are on board. We hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

Frame as Constant Invitation Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 is an example of a work that sets up its frame and then immediately warns us that it will be shifted. On its surface, the play is about a group of actors who have created a presentation about the genocide of the Herero of Namibia. We’re told, in the stage directions, that the play will have two separate parts: Process (where the actors make choices about what to present) and Presentation (which is the result of those choices). But the next sentence informs us that these two separate parts will not actually be separate but will merge during the play. The Presentation sections and the Process sections are distinct at the start,

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but over time Process becomes Presentation, the spaces aren’t what they appear to be and boundaries are broken. The audience is prepared for this merge of Process and Presentation in the prologue. Actor 6 addresses the audience using prepared notes on index cards and speaks to herself in loud asides that undercut the authority of what she is reading. She reads a prepared speech. She also interrupts herself to clarify, talking directly to the audience. The lines that are read are italicized, the parts that are said are not. Actor 6  Hello. Thank you for coming.     Oh, I already did that.     Welcome to our presentation.   We have prepared a lecture to proceed the presentation because we feel that you would benefit from some background information so as to give our presentation a greater amount of context.     Yeah. Ok, so, the lecture’s a lecture but it’s not a lecture lecture.     We made it fun.    Ish.     Sort of.    Anyway.   The lecture’s duration should last approximately 5 minutes.     It might be ten. I’m bad at time.2

Her asides make the official text and the unofficial text compete for authority. Which one is true? The prologue has chiseled our Rosetta Stone—it’s baked in uncertainty, in “it’s not a lecture lecture,” and it tells us how to go forward in the play. We have not been told what to look for, in terms of facts or story, but the way we will need to see what happens before us. We Are Proud to Present is designed to live inside indefinite, always changing boundaries. It’s a perfect way to structure a play about what historical truth is, who is in charge of writing it, who is it made for and how they should receive it. History is the original example of the observer effect—the phenomenon where the more that something is watched, the more it is changed by being watched. History changes the frame of everyone who attempts to discover it, remember it, tell it. The play expands the zone and nature of not-knowing that is the opposite of history, and then it uses those new parameters to redefine and claim what history is. By the end of the play, we will lose the ability to tell the difference between Process—are we watching a group of actors arguing about how to create a presentation of the

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history of the Herero?—and Presentation—are we watching an argument that looks like the Process but is really the Presentation? And inside that uncertainty, we will be forced to recalibrate our understandings of what we have just seen.

There Is an Old Saying in the Theatre: The First Twenty Minutes Are Free One of the reasons a piece of timebound art is able to work so freely on so many surfaces to shape our gaze is that during the opening minutes of a play or film, the audience is open. Their expectations are both limitless and—for this brief window of time—almost completely without expectation of being fulfilled in a particular way. The audience will go virtually wherever they are asked to go without question, without requiring understanding now or assurances about the nature of the rewards further down the line. They understand the convention: this is the setup, the payoff comes later. The audience members acknowledge the implicit contract—they have come to be transformed, and the work of art is in charge of that transformation—but they do not require transformation just yet. They also don’t mind working hard for that transformation, as long as it doesn’t feel too much like work. And the twenty-minute period isn’t a law—it’s more of an observational truth that stretches or shrinks according to the work in question. The start of any timebound work of art is the honeymoon. The audience is allowed to enjoy or be entranced or be mystified without worrying about what it all means. But all honeymoons eventually end. And they end on the audience’s clock, which is made out of their attention. We should note that culturally this clock is changing, shortening, and the first twenty minutes are not going to be free much longer. Technology and its relentless speedup of our lives affects everything—our sense of duration most of all. It is possible that the first free minutes have already withered to fifteen or ten or less. We see the famous example of what happened to popular music after Thomas Edison’s cylinder recordings hardwired a new length into our expectation for musical event. The cylinders could only hold four minutes of music, so every song that was recorded had to be shorter than

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that. A new length for popular music was set—a standard that has continued through to the present even after long-playing records came along. The cylinder shrank our attention span for music. It never fully recovered. Some people believe that this was the moment that ended classical music’s ability to reach a large part of its former audience—they simply lost the attention to listen to longer pieces of music. (Reverse engineering happened with the length of the first CDs—seventy-three minutes, which, according to tech lore, was arrived at because the president of Sony wanted Beethoven’s Ninth to fit onto a single disc.) The relation of the container of a timebound event to the thing it carries is fundamental in all respects—traditionally, or at least during the last few centuries, live performance happens as a two-tothree hour event. That time is shrinking to ninety minutes, and the time at the top that is free shrinks with it.

A Closer Look at the First Twenty Minutes Joe Orton said that “the play is the meat which makes the audience put the hook in their mouth. Nobody’s going to put a bare hook in their mouth.”3 All works set their hooks differently and set them in their own unique time signature. Some remarkable plays and films never stop reframing the nature of the meat or the hooks or both. During the first twenty-minute period, a work invites the audience into the world and shapes their gaze. It does this first by teaching the audience the code that will help them decipher the work. Every work creates its own language, which we have to learn in order to understand the work. There are linguists who contend that every word in every language only has meaning because of the entire language that it is a part of. In other words—meaning exists only in context, in both life and word-based art. So each work provides the code and context required to understand it. And it provides it in the beginning of the work, because the sooner the better. Additionally, all language is a metaphoric system that a community has agreed will carry meaning in a specific way. We agree to become an even more specific community for each movie or play we see. Of course, not all stage language is word-centric—some of our most remarkable theatre makers create gestural languages. Some use visual image to carry their meaning. In a Robert Wilson performance, we have to learn

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how to move forward in a world made out of image and gesture, or get left behind. Some works establish a vocabulary of desire that trumps all other vocabularies. Filmmakers, of course, create unique visual languages we learn how to interpret and understand. The first minutes also serve as an overture, where all the important notes of the work are sounded. They create a template for the entire work—as a rule, everything that will matter will in some way be introduced or put in motion during this golden period. In an opera or musical, an overture ensures that motifs and melodies that happen later in the work sound familiar to us, and so are easier to understand—we’ve learned how to hear them already. An overture teaches us how to recognize important musical themes when we hear them again. In a play or film, we utilize this familiarity to make the work’s progress feel inevitable. The things that call forward from the beginning seem to fit into a pattern we already know. And the result of this? They seem true. Plays are self-similar, they are fractal, which means that small branches look like big branches, which look like the whole tree. Each part in some way resembles every other part. Since plays are timebound art, this similarity happens periodically throughout the piece. The twenty-minute period helps establish the phase or cycle during which the play’s self-similarity will repeat itself. In Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the phase is sometimes as short as a single page. There is an essential pattern that is repeated rapidly: attack, seduce, attack, seduce, and Honey says “oooh.” The play also has a longer repeat that happens in the deeper rivers that flow through the play as Martha and George battle for their very souls. Additionally, the old cliche “The first cut is the deepest” is especially true in timebound art. The opening images and actions and dialogue work on us the way imprinting does on baby birds and other animals who blindly follow the first thing they see. Every time we go to the theatre we are a new-born audience, and the images we see in those first few minutes will imprint on us. We will hold them inside us, remembering them as something essential. This is important because an end is built out of the beginning, which makes the end something we already know. When we reach it, it is already a part of us. This is why beginnings and endings of plays often mirror each other. Our greatest dramatists are instinct-driven animals too, and they fall back to their openings to find their endings. This mirroring is like a rhyme. There is Esther, sitting alone at her sewing machine at both the beginning and end of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. We’ve seen this picture before, so we know how to see it, and we focus easily on what is different about it. During the

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play, she has been robbed of her savings by the husband who has abandoned her, but she is not “alone” in the same way she was at the beginning of the play. She is now pregnant with a much-wanted child, and she is sitting down at the machine to make a life for herself and that child. Same/not same. The opening of a play is always reaching forward to its ending. That it does so visually is of course one of the great delights of the theatre. We process pictures in a different part of our brain than speech. And there is this: unless we are later told otherwise, we always believe in the truth of those first moments and their images. They are privileged, in our experience of the work, by their place. And most essentially and importantly, the first moments we spend in the world of a work tell us what is essential and important. They tell us how to identify value in the work. A play almost always announces itself, usually in the first few beats. It creates the world and the laws that allow it to exist. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, Margaret’s developmentally challenged daughter Joyce and Margaret’s struggle to care for her is foregrounded in the first three minutes of the play. While we are not necessarily aware of it moment to moment, there is not a single instant in this play that is not about this struggle. This is an example of one of Lindsay-Abaire’s gifts as a dramatist: he is able to hide the heart of this play beautifully and fully, in plain sight. This is the way great plays happen. Great plays have their essential DNA braided so thickly into every moment of the play that this “announcement”— this declaration or proof of essential value, of what matters—is everywhere. On every page. Value is the word we use when we try to talk about what matters and the meaning that a work is attempting to create in its audience. In the end, value is everything because it is the thing that, when we engage with a work of timebound art, our emotional, empathetic self sees in a new way. It is the way we know what to hope for and how to hope for it. Once an understanding of what matters is firmly seated in the audience, they can begin to construct their own hopes and become full collaborators in the drama they are experiencing.

Exercise: Tracking the First Twenty Minutes Read the first twenty minutes of a play you know well. List everything that happens, is referred to, or is set up. Then list anything that is

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important to the play that is not mentioned in some way during this period. Occasionally, there will be something that turns out to be essential to the play that does not have some presence in these first minutes—but this will be the exception, not the rule. Don’t stop with one play. Try it with two or three. Try it with a movie—you’ll find that it’s usually true there too. We often forget the middle of plays and films, and sometimes, unfortunately, the endings as well. We rarely forget the beginning because it has utility—it helps an audience decide which moments to hold onto and how to organize all the moments that follow. I believe that we have some sort of instinct to notice and retain the first signal in any new situation. We use the beginning of a work throughout its duration as a kind of map. We keep it close, and we learn how to read it and refer to it often so we don’t get lost. That means we have sustained contact and intimacy with those early moments.

Some Advice about the First Twenty Minutes Do not ever discard your first twenty minutes. By the time you are twenty minutes into a script, the laws of the world have been established. All the natural laws that govern your work—its gravity, time, and space—are in place. Parts of the work are calling to each other, its gravity is already attracting some things to its surface and dragging some all the way down to its core. It has already organized itself. Start a new play or screenplay if you want, discard the whole act—we all do at some point. But don’t ever dismiss what is happening in those first few minutes when your world is forming and you are just along for the ride—there are clues there that can help you understand how your movie or play works. Rewrite those first pages, sometimes substantially, but always keep your original and refer back to it. Be careful about editing out the stuff that “doesn’t make sense,” the anomalous stuff, the stuff that you or maybe your director doesn’t think “moves the play forward.” A play doesn’t just go forward in a straight-line narrative, it goes forward in all directions, and sometimes, as in Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, the straightline forward motion of the play is infinitesimal compared to these other

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Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them

ways of movement. For all I know, the first draft of Long Day’s Journey began entirely differently, and I feel pretty confident in saying that O’Neill wasn’t doing any of the things I believe happen during the first minutes of his play on purpose—it’s all instinct. But he surely saw the rightness of it where it ended up. After they are written, we can see how a play or screenplay actually works. We can see how it casts the first part of its spell at its start in ways that can be identified. This beginning period is the bedrock that supports the entire experience, the vital interface that invites the audience into the world, and shows them how to move through it.

Tone Tone isn’t everything in a timebound work of art, but it’s pretty close. When we talk about a work of timebound art, we sometimes complement its persistence of tone, which is a way of recognizing a work’s ability to be itself throughout its duration. If it’s a comedy, we might talk about its sustained comedic tone. Or, if it starts as a broad comedy and then shifts to drama, we might remark on how well it makes that pivot. And we assume we know what we are talking about, that we know what makes something have a specific tone—comedy makes thing comedic, drama makes things dramatic. Satire makes things satiric. But if we try to get down closer to look at what creates tone, we end up not knowing exactly where to look. Tone is not quite the product of dialogue, or conflict, or movement, or lights, or sound, or any single thing that happens on stage. Tone is all of it—everything that happens and how it transits the liminal space between the work and audience. Tone is, in the end, the way a work of art controls the way we receive it. When it comes to tone, we find ourselves in the presence of something that matters past a lot of what we can say about it. It’s the essence of the work that can be conveyed without words but often uses language to do so. Sometimes tone feels like a spell that a work casts on us. Like a tuning fork, once it is struck properly the tone of a work rings true and clear so the audience can tune the instruments of their hearing, seeing, and feeling to be in concert with it. Tone is unique and specific to every work and to every theatre and filmmaker. We tend to talk/not talk about tone by talking about the director’s style, or a writer’s voice, or an actor’s craft, or a designer’s palette, but most artists have a tone that is a carrier of their work—a style, or voice, or set of preferences that

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persist from one work to the next. Some artists have stronger tonal stamps then others. Some actors seem to give the same performance every time—and it’s wonderful, every time. Some give the same performance every time—and it’s not. Some designers have a trademark set of aesthetic choices that are the bedrock of their work. Some directors have a specific vision, a stylistic set of tricks, a way of moving actors on stage, or way of structuring time and image that is recognizable from work to work. We all know that a Hitchcock film feels like a Hitchcock film, that the way he sequences event makes us see and hear in a way that is recognizable and particular to his work. When we see different productions of a play, we get a clear idea of the power of tone to make or unmake meaning. When Ivo Van Hove adapts a classic and makes it his own, it’s his tone that is the new air that the play and the audience is breathing. And we can break down his tone into small components—his use of sound, the actors he prefers to work with, the way they move, the use of space—but in pieces, these elements do not explain or express the whole story. Tone in the act of writing is probably a sense of what you want to do to and what you want from the audience, what giving their attention to the work will do to them. Tone is the way that this transaction occurs. It is an invisible delivery system that is an essential part of how “what happens” happens to the audience. Tone is the biggest part/result/intent of collaboration. The choices the director makes in casting and the designers she chooses begin this dance, each choice influencing the next, and these choices manifest in tone. When a work’s tone is strong enough, it controls the early choices of the collaborators, and these early choices influence the next choices, and so on. It is a virtuous cycle. Each “right” choice narrows the range of the next possible choice, making it more likely to match the work’s tone. Some fiction writers say that without control of tone they would have nothing. I once mentioned to Jane Smiley that the production controlled tone when my plays were performed, not me. “Oh you poor thing” she said, “You must be a saint.” Our inability to control tone in production is one of the things that makes writing for the theatre so transformative and exciting: Our work is completely open to the collaboration.

And so deadly: Our work is completely open to the collaboration.

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It is also what makes Pinter a genius. His plays are almost 100 percent tone. Almost no story and very few places for us to anchor ourselves securely in what’s happening and why. Most of that tone is menace and threat. His texts actually do control the tone of his productions, within this caveat: when the collaboration is right and his plays are done well. Of course, this means that a bad Pinter production is about absolutely nothing, as there is no backup to organize the experience for the audience. Additionally, in most theatrical experiences, where you sit in the house determines the intensity of tone, because the choices of the collaboration— stage pictures, modulation of actors’ voices, small gestures—can become less distinct with greater distance from the stage and center of the house. It is an architectural fact—except in small houses, you cannot deliver the exact same dramatic experience to everyone at the same moment. On the other hand, a great production of a great play will lose nothing no matter how far away you are from the stage—I saw Mark Rylance on Broadway in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem from a true nosebleed seat, further away than I had ever seen a show in my life. I was spellbound every second—nothing that the play was about was not available to me, every moment on stage was able to expand and settle inside me. And the Broadway audience will pretty much get everything there is to get no matter where they sit at Trey Parker/Matt Stone/Robert Lopez’s The Book of Mormon, and not just because of a stateof-the-art amplification system. Jerusalem and Mormon are about what they are about to a deep, unyielding degree, and they are completely accessible and available to their audience. Works for the screen are never reduced by this kind of tonal variance—what happens on the screen happens reasonably identically for every member of their audience.

There Is Always a Clock Almost all plays and works for the screen begin at a moment when something is about to happen. The hero has till sundown to get out of Dodge. The heroine has to take the full course of cancer treatments. The polar vortex is coming. The iceberg is waiting for its date with the Titanic. Some characters hope that whatever is coming will come; others don’t. But regardless of any individual character’s hopes or fears, a fuse has been timed and measured and lit. And when it burns down, the play or movie comes to its end. Each work’s fuse is a clock that belongs to the story of the piece, where it controls and motivates actions and events. But its greatest utility is that it

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shapes the audience’s attention. It organizes an audience’s hopes and fears so that they can progress through the work with urgency and awareness of stakes they can measure against mileposts along the way. They know that when time runs out, either for desired things or things that fill the characters with despair, the game is over. The one-woman play that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series Fleabag was based on begins with a scene about its primary story clock—Fleabag is running out of time to save the Guinea Pig Café, so she’s at the bank, desperate for a loan. This, a standard “rent is due” clock, ticks just loudly enough that we never lose track of it. “Will Fleabag save the Café before time runs out” is the fuse that counts down the narrative drive and controls and motivates many of Fleabag’s choices. The audience is never told a definite date when time will run out, but this clock still organizes both the play and the streaming first season. Sometimes a clock is even more indefinite than this one—Godot does not carry a watch, but his expected arrival is still the clock that organizes Beckett’s play. Sometimes there is a bomb that has to be disarmed in five minutes, or an asteroid that will hit us in three days— disaster films are all clock. The clocks of every work are unique and specific since they are generated inside the work’s dramatic forces. And while there is usually more than one clock, the primary clock is obvious by its essential urgency, and how it counts down the heartbeats at the center of the work. Sometimes this clock is short—the rent is due on Friday, or long—the baby is due in three months. A good clock is always ticking, and the audience never loses track of where they are in reference to it. It tells the audience what matters, and the countdown to time’s up becomes as important to the audience as it is to the characters. In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, the plantation is being foreclosed, and its upcoming auction, which includes the sale of its slaves, looms over everything. The much-awaited letter should arrive in the mail and save the day. Both the letter’s expected arrival and the sale date create absolute periods of time, which also foreground each other’s urgency. In Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, the first clock we encounter is Matilde’s desire to come up with the perfect joke. And while we assume that she will discover or not discover it in a significant way, there is not a specific deadline for its discovery, so it isn’t a particularly urgent clock. It’s soon backgrounded by Lane’s impatience with a maid who won’t clean—will Lane fire her? When? This is followed by the discovery of Charles’s affair—when and how will Lane find out? All these clocks give the play forward motion, but they have

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no specific deadlines. So it is easy for all of them to float into the background when everything is subsumed by the clock of Ana’s returning cancer. Once it is put in motion, this is the clock that will control our forward-directed longings for the play. And it will be enormously satisfying to us when, in the final moments, the original clock of the perfect joke will come roaring to the foreground of the play and merge with the clock of Ana’s death. One of the things that is so pleasing about the play, and contributes to The Clean House’s tight, made out of itself cohesion, is that even though the clock of Ana’s cancer takes over the central pulse of the play, the clocks of the other desires and needs continue to tick and collect and organize the dramatic forces of the work. And collecting all of them is the shadow clock that is organized by the central question of the play, the deeper and more essential question that is the work’s beating heart and that all these supporting clocks serve in a beautiful, elegant machinery: will Lane learn compassion in the time allowed? Most timebound works have shorter or less urgent clocks that support their primary one. The primary clock is the one that makes the clearest path that matters most to the audience, and once it starts ticking, it can’t stop till the end. In Fleabag’s first season, there are several short organizing clocks—Claire’s surprise birthday party, the return/departure of Fleabag’s boyfriend Harry, the upcoming Sexhibition. All of these propel us forward and help get us to the answer that the central question of the season has been asking—when will Fleabag be forgiven. In Season Two, interestingly, the secondary clocks have arcs that stretch the entire length of the season—will Dad really marry the vile godmother, will Claire leave Martin and run away with Klare, and most importantly: will Fleabag and the Hot Priest make love? The primary story clock of the season—when will Fleabag truly fall in love—is supported beautifully by all these secondary clocks. In August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, the sale of the land is the ticking time bomb that controls everything. Willie Boy has a set amount of time to sell the watermelons he’s brought and his half of the piano and get back home and give Sutter’s son the money. Of course, we know that it is possible that this clock is a cruel lie—Sutter’s son would sell the land out from under Willie Boy in an instant, assuming that he hasn’t already. But that doesn’t diminish the urgency of this clock, or the power it has to force choices. Also, those watermelons aren’t getting any younger. Decay is a simple clock, and we are reminded often that it is ticking. Even though we never see a single watermelon, it is impossible for an audience not to worry about them. Willie Boy and Lymon make a point of saying that they picked them fresh, but

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the audience is counting the days and hoping Willie Boy and Lymon will sell them before they rot and their value and ability to help buy the land drains away. Musicals adore clocks—the Wells Fargo wagon is a comin’ or the audition/ big dance/start of a new life is tomorrow. Fairy tales would be nonexistent without clocks—if the Little Mermaid had an infinite amount of time to make the Prince fall in love with her, her story would have had a happy ending. Danny Rubin/Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day is more or less that fairytale, after all, with an infinitely expanding clock. But as we all know, potions and magic spells and deals with the devil always have a sell-by date. Midnight is a universally terrifying thing in a fairy tale, the end of hope and dreams. And the movies love a clock. “A race against time” could be the shorthand description for seventy-five percent of our film output—maybe more. All action movies are structured inside a clock. The bomb is going to go off when the train gets to Chelsea Station, or the bus is going to explode when it goes under fifty miles per hour (talk about a ridiculously versatile clock! It could be short, but also potentially long at the same time), the prisoner will be electrocuted at midnight if the stay of execution doesn’t arrive, and the aliens are doing any and everything that aliens do and our heroes have seventeen minutes to race across town to save the world. We have entire films (Die Hard), and several robust film franchises (the Die Hards), built around nothing but ticking clocks. Ultimately, clocks are a center scaffolding that helps the audience structure their hope. A strong clock counts down the when of the characters’ desires, it counts down how long they will be given to struggle to get them, it counts down the meaning of too late. Who would get excited watching Cinderella stroll home leisurely after the ball? The clock is going to strike twelve, and the audience is desperate for her to make it home before it does.

Exercise: Spend Some Time with Structured Time Every time you encounter a timebound work of art, chart its clock and evaluate how it functions. Keep a file or notebook of these clocks. See if patterns appear. When you start paying attention to the way clocks organize timebound works, you’ll be amazed that you didn’t notice this before.

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Attention A magician who has turned pickpocketing into an art, Apollo Robbins, says this about how he is able to relieve his “victims” of their watches and wallets: “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention. Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”4 A truly good work of timebound art is a magic act, and controlling the flow of attention is one of the keys to hiding things in plain sight. Attention is different from ordinary time because it is focused time, a choice of how to exist inside it. Attention may be the most valuable thing in the universe—it is the ultimate non-renewable resource. Once we spend our attention, it’s gone. We count on being rewarded for the hours we spend watching a play or film in a variety of ways that justify the investment. We can be filled with delight, or suspense, or insight, or all three. A timebound work has to find a way not just to reward us for paying attention but to continually refresh and refill our capacity to pay it. Otherwise, the audience will run out of it, and they will no longer be able to receive the work. Apollo Robbins uses the phrase “carving up the attentional pie” to talk about what he does, and this asks us to see attention as a finite commodity— there are only so many pieces. Let’s say that each audience member walks in the door with a full pie—a hundred dollars of attention. They pay attention to everything. They spend their hundred dollars during those first twenty minutes, making and reevaluating frames of reference, following the story line, learning who the characters are and what they want, understanding what is at stake. Understanding what is valued in the work. The play or film will tell them what to value, what to pick up and hold on to, and what to ignore. But sometimes it’s hard, sometimes everything looks equally valuable, equally shiny and new. They try to carry it all. And then it happens. At twenty-one minutes they run out of attention. Their hands are full, and they can’t move forward. New ways of evaluating the frame are offered to them, new story events, a new character—but their hands are too full. They are weighed down with the things the work has asked them to carry forward. They can barely take another step. And not only are all these heavy things important for comprehension, but the audience has paid for these things with their attention, and it is a simple fact across the planet’s species, from fish to buffalo to bees, that what has been purchased at the cost of the treasure of time or resources is valuable.

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We always value what we have paid for. The audience could drop some things randomly, and that would lighten their load, but it is never a good strategy to let an audience think that anything they have paid for doesn’t matter. Never a good idea to let them know that their attention is worthless. If their attention doesn’t matter, then what does? In order to go forward, they will need more attention to process moments and retain them the way we want them to. How do we pay their attention back so they have more of it to spend? The best way, of course, is with a perception shift.

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The Perception Shift If there is a single essence that is at the core of every artistic event—musical, visual, or word-based—it is the perception shift. A perception shift is, simply put, a surprising, significant relationship between two things. It is the relationship of a before and an after. A perception shift is what happens when we have an “Ah, ha!” or “Oh! Now I see!” moment. It’s the moment we get the punch line of a joke and we see that it should have been obvious to us all along. It’s when an optical illusion resolves, say, Wittgenstein’s duck rabbit, where we see the duck, we see the duck, we see the duck, and then—BAM, we see the rabbit and then we can’t figure out why we didn’t see it all along.

Illustration 2.1  The duck rabbit. Source: Robert Faires

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It is the pleasure that blooms inside us in the moment we hear and feel the surprising rightness of a good rhyme. It’s that feeling when a piece of a complicated puzzle slips into its oddly perfectly shaped little space and suddenly the hidden picture is revealed. Timebound works of art tend to be made of a continuous stream of accumulating perception shifts with a concluding or ultimate perception shift at the end. Every perception shift is constructed completely by the unique work of art that generates it, and can only be identified inside the work, using the laws and gravity that have created it. These laws do not apply to the creation of perception shifts in any other works of art—there is no universal rule that we can follow. At the moment of a perception shift, we have an insight about both the work of art we’re engaged with and about the way we see the world. A timebound work of art generates a strong, invisible magnetic charge. As the audience experiences it, their impressions and questions and possible answers line up, the way iron filings line up in the presence of a magnet, mysteriously obeying an invisible but irresistible force. The charge grows stronger and stronger, inevitably, relentlessly, like a law of gravity impossible to predict and impossible to counteract, until the final moment of the work. Climax is the traditional term for talking about this moment, but it is actually the moment of the perception shift. In the best of our plays, and many of our best films, at this moment the audience is suddenly made aware that the play or the film they have been watching is entirely different from what they thought it was. At this moment, everything that matters now matters in a new and different and more profound way. It is as if the entire work lifts off the ground for an instant, impossibly weightless, obeying only the gravitational force field generated by the work, free of the gravitational force of the day-to-day world—and then it slams back down again to earth. Obeying the unseen force field it has generated, it has reoriented itself. In great plays and films, the audience itself is made weightless. We see something essential about either ourselves or the world or both from a sudden and surprising vantage point. When we return to earth, all our assumptions are aligned to the work’s true north. This moment of weightlessness only lasts a fraction of a second—it may not even be possible to quantify it in terms of time. It may be one of those experiences that happens in our artform where “normal” time does not exist. But however/whenever it happens it is enough. A moment of inescapable, gravity-defying insight is more than enough.

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The Perception Shift

Insight is special. It is not the same as ordinary knowing, and it is not the same as ordinary understanding. We understand and know a lot of things. But a sudden, surprising yet inevitable new way of seeing—that can change a person. That’s worth our time and attention and our money. That’s worth going to the theatre for. When we change the way someone sees, even if only for an instant, we change them. That is our job. And how do we change them? How do we defy gravity, stop time, and trigger a moment of insight? With a perception shift.

Insight: The Eureka Moment When we have a perception shift, we tumble backwards in an attempt to understand what we were truly seeing. We fall back to the beginning of the play and work our way to the end, rewriting everything we have seen with breathtaking speed. When we return from this brief re-seeing, we return to it with a new way of seeing, with new insight. There is a semi-scientific term for insight and, by extension, the perception shift: the Eureka Moment. According to legend, a king of ancient Greece gave an artisan a measure of gold to create a crown. When the crown was finished, the king suspected that the artisan had held back some of the gold for himself, but he had no way of proving it. So, the king tasked Archimedes, Greece’s most famous mathematician (he was the more or less Stephen Hawking of his day), with finding out if the crown contained the full measure of gold. Archimedes despaired. He had absolutely no way of solving this puzzle. Then one day, while in the bath, he noticed that his body displaced a volume of water. Eureka! he shouted, which translates to “I’ve found it!” He had suddenly intuited the way to measure the gold content in the king’s crown by inventing, in a burst of insight, the law of buoyancy. Archimedes’ bathtub epiphany was that it would be possible to measure the volume of water that the amount of gold displaced. If the crown did not displace the same amount of water, it meant that the artist was a thief. The deep, special understanding that we get from an “ah-ha” moment like this is different from the one we get from solving a problem logically, plodding along, figuring things out with a linear A + B = C process. Insight is a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe that lets us understand

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things like jokes and metaphors and doubleness. It has enormous value in our artform because of its stickiness, because what we understand through insight we remember better than what we understand through logic. Since we depend on the audience’s memory to shape their path through our work, each moment of insight they have guarantees that they will have a special relationship with the parts of the work that created it. And insight has another essential attribute that may be even more valuable than this mnemonic quality: what we understand through insight we believe to be true. We have no defenses to this kind of understanding. Even if we can’t understand why our insight is true, we know irrefutably that it is. It has come to us in a flash, outside of the time we take in our usual thought process, so it comes whole and undiminished by our usual piecemeal methods of evaluation and meaning construction. What we produce by explanation is a baser metal. What implodes inside our bodies, in interior epiphany, is gold. And so it is off-limits for any evaluation using logic to qualify or invalidate it. It’s just there, whole and unassailable. Insight is a truth that feels truer than any other kind. Often insight feels almost physical. This is another aspect of why we trust it so completely—we feel it in and with our body. We have heard the phrase, “a blinding insight,” but we don’t stop to think what it means. It turns out there is evidence that just at the moment of insight the brain shuts down parts of the visual cortex that receive external input. It’s an interruption that is far too short for us to consciously register, but it is the brain’s version of closing our eyes in order to concentrate. Some visual information is blanked out—the brain shuts down the signal from our normal way of seeing in order to see something in a different way, inside us. Insight is a term that may be not just metaphorical, but functionally accurate. Most timebound works of art succeed because they can control and create a perception shift that triggers a more-or-less similar insight in everyone who sees it. Other works have the ability to create a perception shift in everyone, but somehow, the nature of the resulting insights is wildly individualized, impossible to compare. It is, of course, pointless to quantify insight—there is no profit in comparing what happens to us at a performance of Waiting for Godot to what happens to us at The Merchant of Venice or when we watch The Sixth Sense. The only thing that must happen—and must is always a dangerous word, but in timebound art there are the imperatives of time and the clock that make the “must” essential to our artform—the only thing that must happen, the perception shift, must happen to everyone in the audience at the same time.

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It is as if at the end of a work, an arrow is let fly, and it must hit a bull’s-eye that is nested inside every member of the audience. The audience has let the play or film build this target inside them; they have made themselves vulnerable to it from the second they walked in the door. They have come to the theatre for the moment the arrow flies. There may and should be sorrow or delight or narrative interest or gorgeous visuals or slapstick falls along the way—but this is the moment when all these individual moments that have crafted the target and the bow and arrow converge. The ultimate trick shot is, of course, when the arrow hits a target the work has built in the head and heart at the same time. And if the arrow misses? The audience feels cheated. That’s only fair. Hitting the bull’s-eye is everything. It is why plays and movies that seem to offer so little can still satisfy when they hit their mark. The size or quality of the target matters less, at this moment, than successfully striking at its center. There is no such thing as a perception shift that is too small to satisfy, and there is also no limit to the scale of how much a great work’s final perception shift can transform the way an audience sees the world. Plays and films employ shaped surprise throughout their entire length to construct the nature of the rewards the audience anticipates. Creating a hunger in the audience for a certain kind of insight built a certain kind of way is just one way of looking at the process by which we move audiences forward through a timebound work of art. We do this by rewarding their attention with discoveries and insight and then turning those rewards into reservoirs of understanding and anticipation.

Attention and Insight Let’s assume that we do indeed walk into a theatre with a hundred dollars’ worth of attention. The equation of insight, then, goes something like this: you put in five dollars of attention, and the insight you buy with it is so valuable to you that it gives you that five dollars back and a couple of extra dollars as a bonus. The currency of the exchange is based on the worth of “oh, now I see” because your new way of seeing makes everything new. It pays back the attention you spent to create that insight, increasing your store of attention. In any good play, when we sit down in our seats after intermission for Act Two, we have been paid back so well during Act One that we now have two or three hundred dollars’ worth of attention to spend. And in a great play, our desire to know what happens next converts into thousands of dollars of attention.

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But what about all the things we’ve bought with all that attention? No matter how well our attention is repaid with interest, and how much insight we receive in exchange for our attention, we still have to carry all that insight forward, which means we have to carry the memory of the moments that made it. How can we count on having enough hands and pockets to organize and carry all these things? Some memories don’t carry easily, they may mystify or upset us. We may not be exactly sure what they are, and we carry spaghetti differently than we carry kittens. And even the most adorable, delightful kittens will weigh us down if we have to carry hundreds of them. The clock is ticking. We have a final curtain to get to, and we hope we can get to it carrying as much insight as we can. One of the most extraordinary qualities of perception shifts is that the audience can carry an infinite number of them and the things that trigger/are triggered by them because they are antigravity machines. When a moment is “turned” the way a perception shift turns it (when we see what we had seen before in a new way), it not only pays back the attention it took to receive and understand it, it also pays back the price of carrying it to that point and makes it free from that point forward. It becomes weightless. Science teaches us that energy or mass never disappears. In any transference or transformation, energy or mass changes its address, but it doesn’t go away. When something is transformed by a perception shift, its weight seems to vanish because it turns into meaning inside the audience. It transforms from something that is happening on stage and in our memory and now resides inside each audience member, intimately, as a part of them. This transformation is essential because meaning is the heaviest thing there is. I believe we write a work to create as much meaning as it can. A work of timebound art is a machine that is built to carry the weight of meaning, of mattering, of being valuable to its audience—but not all machines are created equal. A light, frothy comedy may carry only five pounds and still satisfy. A tragedy can easily carry twenty times as much, and most of us, at one point or another, have dreamed of writing something that can carry a thousand times more. But it’s hard to build something that can carry that much weight. If you are trying to load a hundred pounds of insight into your play and the machine you’ve built can only carry sixty pounds, you have a problem. You might think delivering the sixty pounds would be worth something, but the rule is you deliver what you promise or you have delivered nothing. A frothy confection that is barely heavier than air but delivers on its expectations will be a more successful work than one that

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promises fifty pounds that can only get its audience to transform twenty pounds into meaning, leaving all those untransformed moments, those unkept promises, to drag the work down. It doesn’t matter what you mean, it matters what you transmit. A play or film is not what you mean. A timebound work of art is not the meaning, or the story, or even the understanding. It is a delivery system that carries all these things into the audience, where they make meaning from them. When the audience pays their attention for things that don’t get transformed into meaning, it means the insights you had imagined were being made were actually not. And that means the audience did not have their attention repaid in a way that makes the weight they are carrying weightless. This is the drag on the experience that will take your work down. When enough moments remain untransformed and can’t become the way to view the next moment, your play is dead in the water. The frothy five-pound play won’t be a better play. But it will work better. It will satisfy. We would expect that each moment of potential meaning would be a good thing—but not if the audience is overwhelmed and can’t carry it forward to use in the next moment. Moment to moment in a work of timebound art, the relationship between the weight being carried and the machinery that is being built to carry it is being negotiated. A perception shift gives the audience antigravity handles, so that it costs them nothing to carry forward anything that has been transformed or turned. A hundred pounds of meaning can feel as light as air in a work that gives its audience perception shifts to carry it. When a work means more than it seems it can—when it carries much more than it seems to be able to—that’s what makes a great play or movie. People like to use the cliché “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This is another way of speaking about that transformation.

The Power of a Moment’s Newness There is a wonderful passage in Guermantes Way, the third novel in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where Proust talks about Renoir. He says that when people first saw Renoir’s paintings, they could not even recognize the things in them. A painting of a forest by Renoir was just a collection of shades that did not resemble anything like trees. But after enough time, when people had learned to see his paintings, they then went into the forest and saw Renoirs everywhere, they looked and pointed and said, as we still

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do today, “Look, that looks just like a Renoir.” To paraphrase Proust: the artist’s job is not to give us new things to see but new eyes to see them with. One of the ways that a perception shift gives us new eyes to see a work with is by turning back the audience’s clock. After a perception shift, the clock of our attention resets at least a few minutes, and if the perception shift involves a large enough part of the work, it resets all the way back to zero. That means we are able to go forward with as much attention as if the play or film is beginning, and we have our entire, fresh, twenty minutes/hundred dollars of attention to spend. Works of great length almost always rely on this strategy to get us to the end while still carrying the entire event with us—Long Day’s Journey into Night is a good example of this. We arrive at the end carrying every single thing that has been said and felt for almost four hours, because the play continually shifts the way we see the same things, over and over again, making them new by giving us new eyes to see them. It invites us to re-see and re-understand everything, it asks us to engage in the “same/not same” and see things differently at every turn. Making something feel new has huge utility for theatre makers and all artists making timebound art. Our audience will always lock on to a new piece of information or action and privilege it over an older piece regardless of how trivial the new piece is or of the older piece’s importance. This is probably the result of an evolutionary survival mechanism. We always focus on any change in our environment because it could indicate danger, but unfortunately, this instinct also makes us highly distractible, and we pay attention to unimportant things just because they are new. Spectators will always be attracted to the new, the novel, to any change, and so our work must exploit our audience’s vulnerability to this. As we design the experience for our spectator, we need to find the way to make the things we want the audience to grab hold of feel “new” in just the right way. A perception shift does this better than anything else. When it comes to a perception shift, there is no limit to the way we can design a moment’s newness, and no limit to how many times we can make the same thing new. In Long Day’s Journey, we see Tyrone’s cheapness through new eyes every ten pages as we go from seeing him as Gaspard the Miser to the image of him as a little boy of ten supporting his mother and younger sisters and brothers, bending over the file he is making in a factory with no heat or light. We are furious with him for not paying for a decent doctor for Mary and then forgive him two speeches later because she does. We feel actual joy when he gives Edmund ten dollars when he is on his way to Dr. Hardy because it makes us hope that Tyrone will change. We

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are wrong. Tyrone’s unchanging relationship with money is the condition for the play. But we do not have an unchanging relationship with money, moment to moment, because every new reference to it really is new. So we do not fatigue and lose the ability to make new associations and be moved by them.

How Newness Drives Insight If I were to ask you what play you’d like to see tonight if the world were going to end tomorrow, your answer would probably be radically different from the play you would pick for your mother. This is because we think we know the nature of the insight other people want to have, the quality of the emotions they want to feel. Over the years, when I have asked writers this question, they have tended to say that their mother would like to see a world-embracing, spiritually uplifting work, generally something tender. They want them to have a soothing, comforting last evening at the theatre, so maybe they’ll pick The Sound of Music, which their mother sang around the house when they were little, and which, while set in the heart of the twentieth century’s most storied horror, has a happy ending and great songs. But for themselves? They tend to pick the play that dazzled them, one day, years ago, the play that moved them in such a new way, and to such a degree, that they could not recover completely from the experience. They pick the play that either made them want to be a writer or made them understand the kind of writer they wanted to be. They remain connected to that moment when they were a member of an audience, and the play gave them a new way of seeing, and they were changed. A new way of seeing is a new way of feeling. What happens to you is the sum of what a work of art is. One way of thinking about how timebound art works is to examine the language we use to describe our experience of it. “It moved me” is not as imprecise or figurative a phrase as it might appear. We tend to say that we were moved by an experience when we have been made to feel a certain set of emotions, but I am talking about the phrase’s more literal meaning here. Timebound art relies on moving us, on changing our vantage point so that we can have a different perspective, so that we can see things differently. It repositions us so that we see a thing in a new way from a new point of view. We are “moved”—made to feel something—because we are “moved”— taken from one place to another, and the world is different there. We are constantly being moved, both to enable the small shifts that refresh our

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seeing throughout and so that we can be in position for the final perception shift. The best works move us in ways we are not aware we are being moved. People want to be moved emotionally, of course, but in the end, the point is not to be moved. It is to be transformed—that nearly impossible thing. Sometimes our work does the moving to distract, it is sleight of hand, so that the audience doesn’t notice that transformation is occurring. Emotions are the mirrors the magic is done with—they are not the trick themselves. An audience must be unaware, for the most part, of the meaning-making it is doing. If we know what a timebound work means to us before the end, we won’t find the ending satisfying. If we are able to construct its meaning in the first fifteen minutes, we have no reason to go forward. So a play’s constant motion keeps the audience actively searching for the way to understand it, while its constant “newness” keeps them alive to each moment’s shifting truth. The play that I long to see on my last night on earth is The Photographer. I saw it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983. It was a music theatre piece in three acts about Eadweard Muybridge, the man whose pioneering photography famously proved that a horse’s legs were all airborne at certain moments when in a gallop. He was known as the man who stopped time. The play was created by Phillip Glass, David Gordon, and Rob Coe, and it ruined me. It made meaning in a way I had not experienced before; it was a play about time that stepped outside of time’s traditional narrative paths but still moved relentlessly forward. It did this, not in the standard “non-chronological” way that time is often used when artists want to disrupt and renew our sense of our timebound-lives but in forcing us to see—and by see I mean see literally, not figuratively—time in a new way. The use of Muybridge’s photographs in tandem with Glass’s music and Gordon’s use of the human figure inside this context was a series of shaped charges that destroyed any previously constructed feelings I had about what could happen to me in the theatre. It reached across the stage and gave me not just a new way of seeing time but a new way of existing in it. I had looked around the corners of the way I lived in each successive moment. A moment like that is unrecoverable. You walk away changed. I’d had a perception shift.

A Joke Is a Small Play The easiest way to talk about a perception shift is to experience one. And the easiest way to do that is to have someone tell you a good joke.

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A German, a Frenchman, and a Jew are lost in the desert.

From the first word of a joke, we are poised like a runner at the starting gate, all ears primed for the starting gun. We are open and alert, just as we are at the beginning of a play or movie. We know that every word is important, because each is potentially the trigger of the trap that we know is being set, and so we listen with tremendous focus. Primarily, we are alert to any doubleness—that is, we are listening with special attention to things that might not be what they seem, that are two things at once. So, we are on the lookout for puns. Doubleness is the sum and substance of puns, which are the lowest form of humor. And they are the lowest form because while they delight us, they are a coincidence of sound and sense and generally not much more. With the exception of examples like the title of The Importance of Being Earnest, they don’t carry much meaning. They please us, and then they are gone. But beyond the easy trigger of a pun, doubleness is the linguistic equivalent of a science fiction wormhole—it is the way we and meaning can travel non-linearly, non-logically, non-rationally through the web of language to arrive at a destination both preordained and surprising at the same time. Doubleness is a broader way of saying rhyme. Of saying simile. Of saying meaning. Of saying a play—which is a double or rhyme for life. So because a joke is almost always created inside doubleness, we look for doubleness with something close to instinct. “Where is the thing that is hiding by not really hiding?” we ask ourselves. Oh, this is one of those jokes that has to be told with horrible fake foreign accents, so please hear everything that the German and the Frenchman say in the best bad accents you can imagine. A German, a Frenchman, and a Jew are lost in the desert. Finally, after days of wandering, the German makes it to the nearest town. He goes straight to the bar, walks right up to the bartender, and says: “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have beer.” So the bartender gives him a beer.

Now we understand that this is a joke about stereotypes, and we have the additional genre signal that it’s a “man walks into a bar” joke. Another clue is that the German asks for a beer. Perhaps the punch line will involve beverages. A joke—exactly like all timebound art—shapes our gaze by controlling what we look at and how we look at it. The beauty of jokes—and why they are easier to write and take less time to experience than a play or a film—is a function of their relationship with

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time. Because we know a joke (as a rule) is short, we know we will not be given more “joke materials” than we can carry. We are panning for gold in a very shallow stream. So we have the ability to focus on every word and image in a joke’s setup, whose brevity makes it possible to consider everything as potentially valuable. In the short joke-time available to us, we can pick up and examine every single word and image in a joke and keep them ready to use as part of the machinery of the punch line. Unlike longer works, where we must engage in a constant conscious and unconscious sorting process, deciding that this looks important but this does not, putting some things into the pockets of our memory and passing other things by, in a joke we know the rules: it may all look like gold. But most of it will turn out to be fool’s gold. The next day, the Frenchman makes it into town. He goes straight to the bar, walks right up to the bartender, and says: “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have wine.” So the bartender gives him a glass of wine.

So now—and remember that if someone is actually telling us this joke, we are processing it all in the time it takes to hear it—now, we’re really looking at the stereotype beverage signal. What drink is the Jew going to ask for? It can’t be Manischewitz wine, that’s just predictable, so no surprise, and no laughter either. Are there other beverages that fit into the stereotype? Or is there a Jewish food that would work? Matzo balls? Kugel? Chicken soup? Nope, not funny. Remember that in joke-time we have only a fraction of a second to have these clusters of thoughts and process these images, but that’s one of the things that’s so enjoyable about a joke: a joke (and all timebound works of art share this quality) makes us feel alive and awake in the moment. Our reward centers are on anticipatory alert—we’re going to get a treat: the punch line. The clock is ticking, and we love the burst of mental activity as we actively search inside this small window of time. We quickly cast ourselves backward over the joke’s clues. What breadcrumbs do we have so far? Stereotype, beverage, three guys lost in the desert—wait, they’re wandering in the desert, is this a Moses joke? There’s a German and a Jew. Is it a Holocaust joke? We examine every detail, evaluating context, looking for pattern. We know the rules—the treasure can’t be completely buried, not in a joke. Finally, the Jew makes it into town. He goes straight to the bar, walks right up to the bartender. And he says: “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have—”

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And here we pause, to rake through the clues one last time to see if we can catch the sparkle of gold, to examine everything for doubleness, to see what is hiding in plain sight. Finally the Jew makes it into town. He goes straight to the bar, walks right up to the bartender. And he says: “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes.”

The joke’s machinery was built inside stereotype, as we suspected, but it was more about stereotypes than we understood—it was not about a superficial beverage preference but about a supposed Jewish trait, hypochondria. The beverages invited us to miss-see the territory of stereotype while they invited us into it at the same time. This is doubleness on a structural level. The joke did not actually ever lie to us—works of art never do either, or at least good ones don’t. Instead, the beverages functioned like oracles do, leading us to make assumptions that we will discover, in the firing of the punch line, are wrong. Samuel Johnson’s famous observation that there is nothing that concentrates the mind so much as the realization that you’ve been wrong is both how jokes and plays work and why they work. We think one thing, then discover that we should have been thinking another. We discover that we were wrong, and for some reason, this satisfies and delights us. Two whales walk into a bar. The bartender says: “What will you have?” The first whale says: “Oehwooooo woheeeee ahhhdooo weeee wheeeaaahhh oeho.” The other whale says: “Shit, Greg, you’re drunk already.”

This is a joke that lives entirely in our assumptions and whose humor resides entirely in our delight in being wrong. The degree to which our assumptions are the true stage where a perception shift occurs should not be underestimated. Okkie Brownstein talks about this moment of the payoff, or kicker, as frame reduction. “A joke consists basically of a ‘setup’ and a ‘kicker’ … And there is a wide general understanding that the relationship between these two parts is, paradoxically, one of incongruity; that is, something about the first element is incongruous with something about the second part, which produces surprise and laughter. But not every incongruity is funny.”1 Okkie believed that the engine of a joke consists in starting in one set of rules and then shifting to another set, something that happens during the time

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between the setup and the payoff. When this happens, “it is the unexpected congruity of the new perspective that produces the effect. … [A]‌fter a millisecond the original frame of reference evaporate. … Even in a joke, a perception shift is a surprise that becomes the experience of discovering an alternative way to see that is both unexpected and significant.”2 And there is an additional delight—there is a moment when we see both the old and the new frame. Okkie goes on to say that “jokes surprise us into switching mental tracks from a more open vision to a more confined one, from a frame that is relatively more general … to one that is relatively more specific.”3 Frame reduction is the moment when the punchline stops being the hundred possible things that we thought it might be and becomes just one, the one we realize it has to be. Frame reduction is pleasing because the new frame is more perfect than any of the other hundred possible frames we might be imagining. Every handhold that the joke or work of timebound art presents to us as a legitimate rung up the ladder through the experience must be solid, every breadcrumb that is cast in front of us must show us the way home and not lead us to a dead end. We must be confident of that. We have to trust the clues and the trail that we see, so incorrectly, otherwise our correct apprehension of them in the end will be meaningless. We have to trust every step along the way, because if we don’t, when we find out how wrong we were—and this is why we come to the theatre, to find out that we are wrong, that we didn’t understand what was happening, that we made incorrect assumptions and blind value judgements—any false step, any cheap trickery, any red herrings or conveniences will let us slip free of the noose that the play is trying to ensnare us with. And we don’t come to slip free. We come to be held fast. We come for the insight that comes when the scales fall from our eyes. In the diabetes joke, it turned out that while the beverages were less telling than we supposed, they were still essential. But inside the references to beer and the wine the most sophisticated surface of the joke was lurking—the grammatical clue in its sentence structure: I must have beer. I must have wine.

Rather than I must have a beer. I must have a glass of wine.

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These grammatical glitches—the fractured English that results in the missing article “a” and the missing “a glass of ”—are something we ignore because of the bad German and French accents. But the bad accents are actually one of the joke’s most important clues. They make the punch line possible. The joke lives beautifully in our ear with its surprising—and inevitable—third “I must have.” The joke flies or falls on the doubleness of “I must have,” exploiting the delightful difference in meaning—a pun, really—between “I must have” as a desire versus “I must have” as a state of being. It is the puzzle piece that fits precisely into a different space than we had expected. And the most important thing about this aspect of the joke is that it wasn’t hidden at all, except in our assumptions about it. It was there, but we ignored it. We decided the bad English was not significant. We saw the bottle of beer and the glass of wine in our mind’s eye, heard the accents, and ignored the anomalous syntax. Any break in assumed normalcy is a dead giveaway in a joke. They are a joke’s Achilles heel, but jokes always charm us into ignoring them. We know there is sleight of hand at work, and we want to catch it in the act—we know that the “truth” of the joke is there, and truth is the funniest thing there is. If only we can be smart and sharp and quick enough we can figure it out. But a punch line is almost always triggered too quickly for us to guess it. Quick is important. Jokes, like plays, are timebound to their core. Jokes are short-form dramatic structures, so it’s no surprise that they function as small perception shift generators. They are pure structure— setup, payoff, perception shift—that’s what makes them funny, the surprising yet inevitable relationship of the setup and payoff. This is the hardest thing to create on stage or screen—this almost magical manipulation of assumption that generates a profound perception shift. It is only in retrospect that we should be able to see and feel the ending as inevitable. What is just inevitable is predictable—and predictable is worthless because it isn’t new, it doesn’t surprise. What we already know is valueless because it has no way to change what we see or think or feel. No insight. We know that we can’t “give away” the ending, we know that we have to “save” the surprise because of its value. And so most of us hide any clues that we think will give the ending away. The problem is that hiding is never a productive strategy for our artform. Hiding can make the climax happen outside the audience’s anticipation. Yes, the audience will be surprised by an ending that is sprung on them

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from nowhere, but surprise outside of anticipation will not mean much to them ten seconds after it happens. Surprise initiates insight only when it is prepared and planted and triggered. When we have not paid with our attention for a setup, the payoff has no value to us. The payoff has to happen inside us, inside the structure of our assumptions, our hopes, and our fears, for it to really matter to us. Hiding in plain sight, however, is a different matter. The perception shift I’d experienced at The Photographer was like a joke that did not stop happening. Its new way of seeing and experiencing time did not fade (that’s the beauty of great art—its newness does not decay). The arrow that the play fired found in me an unending series of concentric targets. And so the arrow that a work of timebound art flies into the heart and mind (and sometimes, soul) of the audience member is where my attention has been trained as I think about what happens to us when we watch a movie or a play. Everything that happens is just about this: what is the arrow made of, and how sharp is its point? How is the wood for the bow shaped, and how is it strung? What sort of strength and training does it take to pull it? How is it aimed? Why does hitting a bull’s-eye matter so much while the arrows that land just a few inches off matter so little? Why do some plays or movies mean nothing at all the day after you see them and fall away from your life like smoke, while others haunt you for the rest of your life? I believe the answer lies in the nature and quality of the perception shift and the insight it creates. It lies in how much of a work has been built inside the audience member out of their memories and their hopes for its characters. What has happened inside us we carry away with us when we leave the theatre. What has happened only on stage or screen is less a part of us and so is easier to leave behind.

The Perception Shift in Three Plays Perception shifts in the audience mirror those on stage to different degrees depending on the play in question. Often the audience’s perception shift piggybacks on a character’s, but not always. A perception shift doesn’t have to happen to any character on stage at all. But it does have to happen in the audience. In Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the reveal at the end of the play shatters our understanding of George and Martha. When we

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understand that their son never existed, we discover that our reading of their “games” was all wrong. Nick and Honey have the same perception shift we do, but it certainly isn’t one shared by George and Martha. Every word they have spoken in the play has been a way of screaming that they have no son, that their childlessness is the central wound and the central bond of their marriage. They have no perception shift when their game comes to an end and they are forced to acknowledge their childlessness, nothing except a deepening of their despair and love. We have the perception shift. We have made assumptions, along with Honey and Nick, that we discover, in an instant, are incorrect. In a play filled with games, there is a profound satisfaction in having all the rules of the greater game switched on us. During the last scene of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Maureen and the audience discover at the same moment that she did not see Pato at the train station the night she killed her mother, that he had left hours earlier by car. This discovery then cascades into our horrified realization that Maureen killed her mother not to be free to marry Pato, an act that the play manages to convince most of the audience is justified homicide, but out of rage and madness. Mag was telling the truth all along—Maureen is crazy. In fact, Mag was her daughter’s court-ordered caretaker, and there was never any chance that she could have gone to America with Pato. This is a catastrophic moment for the audience. We have invested so much hope in the possibility of Maureen’s escape. And make no mistake, hoping costs, it is valuable to us, and it is not an emotion that we are prepared to waste or discard without a fight. The play has invited us to blame Mag and side with Maureen, even though all the facts were right in front of us. Our hope blinded us to the facts, even when the truth was staring us in the face. Throughout the play, most of the audience hopes for the best for Maureen and sides with her no matter what. We do this even after we see Maureen pour scalding oil on her mother’s hand. We make our uneasy peace with the murder of her mother because we believe it is the only way she can join Pato in America and have a life, and even though we don’t condone it, most of us are able to justify the act. But once we know the truth? We feel betrayed by our compassionate instincts, we feel shamed, and we understand that our hope for Maureen was a terrible mistake—she’s the villain, not her mother. Our hope is the best part of us. When a play uses it against us, we feel profoundly betrayed—not by the play but by ourselves. A timebound work of art has an infinite number of ways to make the audience see a thing the way it wants them to see it. And this is one of the most profound and structural ways that the events that matter take place

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in the audience, and not in the actions and events on stage or screen. In the end, events and actions mean nothing except in the way they are seen, interpreted, and valued. Yes, the audience will remember the story events and character actions—but only in the way we have taught them to. There is no “ready-made” action when it comes to our artform. We can make a ruthless murder sweet, or a kiss a terrible weapon. At the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, both Blanche and the audience have the same perception shift, triggered by Stella’s heartbreaking betrayal of her sister. Blanche’s final words, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,”4 are devastating because we understand that she is aware of who her destroyer has turned out to be. We thought, as she did, that once she made it to Stella she would be safe, that her sister would be her protector. We thought, as she did, that it was Stanley who would destroy her, but it is Stella who will be the knife that will slice away Blanche’s final chance and remove her from the world. Blanche has no choice but to depend on the kindness of strangers now that Stella has—justifiably?—chosen her baby and her husband over her. In all three of these dramas, the perception shift that occurs at the end transforms the entire play we have just seen. We tumble backwards and erase our previous incorrect experience of the play with the correct reading. We re-see every moment of the play. This is also exactly what happens at the end of The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense. In all these works, our mind is concentrated with the clarity and insight that comes when we realize how wrong we have been. This is exactly what happens to us at the moment of a joke’s punch line. The old frame vanishes, and the new one slips into place. These works pull off an astonishing magic. It’s not “now you see it, now you don’t” but “now you see it, it was here all along.” It’s a magician whipping the tablecloth out from under a full place setting to reveal not a bare table but another tablecloth with an entire other place setting beneath the original dishes. George and Martha were not vicious monsters but desperate, broken people whose only happiness exists in a fantasy. Maureen was not a young woman sacrificing her life to take care of her decrepit and selfish mother but a woman with dangerous mental problems, who tortured her mother and murdered her without an ounce of remorse. Stella and Stanley were never an innocent Adam and Eve, living blissfully in their small, sexual Eden until Blanche came and destroyed their happiness. The correct reading of these works was always right in front of us. Why didn’t we ask why George got so inappropriately furious at Martha when

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she talked about their son? When we saw Maureen pour boiling oil on her mother’s hand, why didn’t we realize that Maureen was insane? Why, after Blanche gives that extraordinary speech comparing Stanley to an ape, did we not see the truth about Stella when she ran and leapt joyfully into his arms? Now that we understand the truth, it is astonishing to us that we didn’t get it all along. But good works of timebound art know how to make us see the right thing in the wrong way. And because the miss-seeing is something we’ve done, we don’t feel tricked or manipulated. We might feel lost or disoriented for a moment immediately after the truth comes into focus. But on the whole, we feel as if a part of us is suddenly awake and able to see the world of the play clearly for the first time.

Exercise: Experience a Small Perception Shift in the Comfort of Your Own Home You have a favorite joke. If you don’t, the internet has twenty million for you to choose from. Find one that has a good punchline. Tell it to three or four or five people in your living room. Stop before you get to the punch line. Ask everyone to try to guess it. This elongates the “middle” of the joke, and sometimes it drains all the air out of it. Not all jokes can sustain this kind of active scrutiny, and someone may figure the punch line out. Have everyone in your living room tell a joke this way. If you’re lucky, their jokes will give you a chance to feel what happens when you have a perception shift.

Hiding in Plain Sight If a work of timebound art puts all its cards on the table, there’s no game, because the audience has no reason to play. They already know the ending. So we assume we have to hide things in our work. But if we hide all our cards, how will the audience know how to play the game? How will they even know what the game is? The best solution is for a work to show all its cards, so that the audience can play the game easily, but in such a way that the final hand will reveal that they were playing a different game all along. The difficulty lies in the fact that both the game that the audience thinks they are playing and the one they truly are playing have to be absolutely

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consistent and coherent. They cannot contradict each other at any point in the work’s progression, and at the end there can be nothing about the game the audience thought they were playing that invalidates the game they really are. Both games must be absolutely complete. The audience must be able to play the “fake” one, from the start till finish, when it will transform into the other one, the true one, with no break, no interruption of signal. When the audience discovers that they have been playing a completely different game, watching a completely different play or film, they have a huge, satisfying perception shift. The structure of a timebound work of art can almost always be described in terms of this doubleness. What a play or film seems to be doing and where it seems to be going, and what it is really doing and where it is really going (except in the most resolutely narrative works), are two different things that are exquisitely twinned. They are same/not same. They are doubles of each other. While it is impossible to follow breadcrumbs that don’t make sense, it is easy for us to follow breadcrumbs that only seem to make the sense we (incorrectly) think they’re making. When a work is truly doing its job—and this is the gold standard that our best works set for us—its forward motion makes a sense that is vigorous or enjoyable or filled with suspense that never contradicts the true nature of the breadcrumbs and the trail they have made. In other words, the path we walk cannot ever be a lie, even though we saw it through an incorrect lens. We cannot follow breadcrumbs that are not real. The doubleness must be constant and consistent for a perception shift to function properly. Our attention is pattern-seeking and reward-based. So, if the path is crafted well, we will see the right things in the wrong way and follow them blindly until the moment of climax, when the perception shift will reveal the true nature of the path we have traveled to get there. The Sixth Sense is a marvelous example of a work hiding itself in plain sight. It never lies to us. It never tricks us, exactly, except that it is always tricking us. Every scene we see is completely true in both “versions” of the film—the one (spoiler alert!) where we think Bruce Willis’s character is alive and the one we rewind in our head and watch after we realize he is dead. In the version where Bruce’s character is alive, his wife eats an anniversary dinner with her husband at their favorite restaurant, furious at him for being late, grabbing the check and paying it angrily, unable to speak to him because she is so mad. In the version where he is dead, his wife eats an anniversary dinner alone at their favorite restaurant, furious at her husband for being dead, grabbing the check and paying it angrily, unable to speak to

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him because he is dead. The two scenes are exactly the same. In every beat, every word of dialogue. We are what makes one true and the other false— our understanding or assumptions make them different. When we discover that we have been watching a dead man, a ghost, we understand that the truth we are seeing is completely different from what we thought it was. When the audience watching The Sixth Sense discovers that they have been watching a completely different movie, they have a perception shift. For a split second, the two movies—the one they thought they were watching and the one that they discover that they actually were—hover side by side, doubles of each other. There is not a single moment in either that contradicts the other. Yet they are completely different films. Timebound art often uses comedy to manipulate and hide things from us, and comedy ambushes us in closely calculated ways. In Beauty Queen, the play will delight us with Ray, a man who can never remember if their priest is Father Walsh or Father Welsh and if Dolores’s last name is Healy or Hooley. Why would we see Ray’s mindless mangling of people’s names as something significant when we are busy laughing at it? Why would Mag’s similar problem—she can’t seem to remember if she is talking to Ray or his brother Pato—strike us as anything other than cruel, comic relief? But the play is actually planting the moment when Maureen actually becomes Mag, when she sits in her mother’s rocking chair and thinks Ray is Pato. Plays often keep us busy laughing to cloak what is really happening, so that the play can move us relentlessly into place. Comedy is a fabulous way to hide things in plain sight. But the truth is that as long as we engage the spectator’s attention intensely enough, we can hide anything in front of them and they will not see it. There is an actual name for this. It’s called “inattentional blindness,” the phenomenon of focusing so intently on a task that we fail to notice things right in front of us. If you doubt the power of this kind of blindness to— well, blind us—there is a film of an extraordinary study where participants were asked to view a short video and count how many times a basketball was passed during a game. Midway through the clip, a man in a gorilla suit comes onto the court, stands in the center, thumps his chest, and leaves. He is there, in the center of the movie, for nine seconds. When the video finished, the participants were asked about the gorilla. Almost all of them said, “What gorilla?” They were shown it again. And were amazed when the gorilla strolled casually onto the center of the court. The task of counting the times the basketball was passed had used up their attention completely.5 We control what people see and hear and what they don’t.

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Of course, because timebound art is not a basketball game, we never want them to miss the gorilla. We want them to see/not see the gorilla. See it but not think it matters and dismiss it, but at the same time, and this is the hard part—remember it and hold on to it without knowing exactly why or how until it is triggered, like the bad accent and broken syntax in the lost-in-thedesert joke. This is the nature of the utility of McDonagh’s name-confusion running gags in Beauty Queen as they go about revealing/hiding the gorilla beautifully. We laugh at these running gags and dismiss them as having any other significance than as indicators of Mag’s senility and Ray’s indifference. Hiding in plain sight is a complicated thing. Once when I was teaching at the Michener Center at the University of Texas, Austin, I was leading a post-play reading discussion with Suzan Zeder, the playwright who brilliantly headed up the graduate playwriting program at the time. Everything was going the way these after-play discussions go, when Suzan asked “And what about the murder in the first act?” It was an astonishing moment. Not a single person in the room (other than the playwright of the play, and Suzan, who had read the play several times) had any idea what she was talking about. We all said, “What murder?” Because the murder had not been planted or paid off—and most importantly, because it had no consequences—we automatically forgot it. A murder had happened—a significant part of the play—but we had no way of fitting it into our experience of the play. The murder was an incongruity—like the gorilla. We saw it, but because the play ignored it, after a little while, so did we. A play whose breadcrumbs we forget is a play we can’t follow. The task that we face, when hiding things in plain sight, is that we have to make them both invisible—like the gorilla—but also completely visible at the same time. We have to exploit inattentional blindness so that it works for us. The audience has to not notice or pay attention to the fact that they are seeing the gorilla, but then, when triggered, they must be able to remember that they did see it after all. Because if they don’t remember the gorilla, the pieces will not all fit into place. If, at the end of a play, the audience is saying the equivalent of “what gorilla?” we will have failed. Most writers, however, share a common impulse to really hide the gorilla from the audience and then wonder what went wrong. One day after workshop at Iowa, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I gleefully announced: Me  “Oh, now I understand how plays work! You just figure out what you want to say, and then you hide it for two hours.”

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This is the exact opposite of how a great work of art works. Because if we hide things, they will not be available to the audience at the end. When a writer waits till the end, and then flings the secret or hidden thing or reveal at the audience during the final moments, not only is it unsatisfying because the audience has not been appropriately prepared, but there will be no perception shift, no insight. The target has not been crafted inside the audience. Both the arrow and the bow feel random in this kind of surprise. The audience feels tricked, cheated, misused. Your characters may lie to each other and to themselves. Your play may keep secrets from its characters. Your play may invite the audience to look in the wrong place at the exact moment they should be looking somewhere else. But a secret purposefully kept from the audience has no handles. A play makes handles for us to carry its important parts. It is part of the play’s strategy to help us carry some things and to decide which things to put aside. We pick up and carry parts of the play that we care about, or that make us laugh, or are familiar to us—caring, laughter, or familiarity is intimacy, a relationship, it helps make the handles. But a secret? Something that is being withheld? Your audience can’t carry something they can’t see and in some way recognize. If you hide things from the audience, they are not available for you to “use” to move the audience forward and to maneuver them into position for the killing blow. And at the end of your play, the audience will not say, “Oh, now I see.” They will say, “Oh. Where the hell did that come from?” In the beginning of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, we see a scene set in 1800s America, but a character is twerking to a song by Rihanna. We think this is a design choice. But we soon discover that the play is not set in the 1800s—it is set in the current moment, and what we thought was a “lie”—a song by Rihanna in the wrong time—is in fact the truth—the character is dancing to a Rihanna song. We have a substantial perception shift at this moment, and we see everything we’ve seen up until that moment differently. But more importantly, we’ve been taught how to view the entire play, we’ve been given the Rosetta Stone that tells us not to assume that what we see is what it looks like. Was the play hiding the fact that the scene took place in the present, not in the past? No, it was showing it to us all along. It was hiding in our assumptions, in plain sight. At the moment we have a perception shift, we realize that we are always being offered the chance to see pattern and sequence and truth. It is always right there. If we just pay the right attention, we will discover we are standing right in front of it.

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Theatre Is a Rhyme for Life A rhyme connects two things that “need to be connected.” Two words that previously had nothing to do with each other, when placed in a couplet by a master of the artform, find themselves like Romeo and Juliet at the ball—the moment we hear the second rhyming word land, the pair’s metaphorical eyes lock, and it is impossible to imagine that they are not fated to be bound together for all time. When we hear a rhyme, lights go off everywhere in our brain—it literally crackles, even lighting up in places that are not speech centers. This is because our brain has evolved to seek out pattern. Pattern recognition helps us predict what and when and how things are going to happen. If we can remember the habits of what wants to eat us and what we want to eat, we can eat more reliably and be eaten less often, and if we learn to predict and prepare for the seasons, we can live less at the mercy of the weather. Rhyme is a mnemonic device. We will remember forever the nursery rhymes we heard when we were young. We assume that our ancestors used rhyme to remember and pass on survival information—rhymes help embed information in the brain. For hundreds of generations, if you were more sensitive to pattern you were more likely to survive and pass on your genes, and so we’ve ended up as a population with a predilection for and a pleasure response to patterning in all shapes and form, including a particular delight in rhyme. The poet Richard Kinney says that rhyme is when the head and heart say the same thing at the same time. We get pleasure from reading poetry on the page, but hearing or reading it aloud gives us another form of pleasure. These two contexts—these two places where we recognize truth—make poetry ring especially loud. Theatre shares spoken poetry’s pleasures in ways that novels or film cannot.

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Doubleness is the heart and form of rhyme. A rhyme’s meaning doubles itself—and becomes a twinned knowing and feeling. Two things placed in relationship: same/not same. It is why we take joy in harmony. It is why we delight in two people dancing in duet. It is why we like two shades of pink side by side. It is why we know the boy will get the girl, except when the girl gets the girl. The critic/poet I. A. Richards says, “The mind is a connecting organ.”1 It looks for pattern everywhere. It looks for relationships and connections, and when it finds them, it calls them rhyme, or fate, or luck, or coincidence, or love at first sight. And in every one of those relationships and connections there is first the pleasure we feel when we discover that the relationship seems to be a part of a pattern, because pattern is something we were born to recognize. Our pattern-seeking appetite may be one of the reasons why we go to the theatre—we want to watch while a mysterious event unspools in front of us, revealing its surprising but inevitable pattern at the play’s end. It is an impulse that is hardwired inside us. A play is a form of faith, and so its resemblance to a religious ceremony, with a congregation witnessing a ritual event played out before them, is no accident. The drive to gather together to witness an event of structured uncertainty that ends in certainty feels like a primal instinct. The thirst to understand the connection between things, to recognize and establish the pattern that is cause and effect, to make the world make sense—this is vital to our sense of self. David Eagleman, the neuroscientist who investigates our relationship with our perceptions of the world and how we create our sense of self, says that the brain is interested in one thing only: meaning. While there is a certain pleasure in perfect rhyme, perfection is just one of rhyme’s delights. Just as there is near rhyme and close rhyme and invisible rhyme (the rhyme that your brain fills in but which is left unvoiced or said), there is the rhyme that is meaning, the rhyme that a metaphor is, and the rhyme that a play makes—a rhyme for life.

Certainty, Meaning, and Maybe “Look at that traffic,” my sister once said to me, as we traveled on an interstate on the way to a family reunion. The lanes on the opposite side of the interstate had slowed to a standstill. “There’s been an accident,” she said. “Not necessarily,” I said. “It could be construction.” “No, it’s an accident,” she said. “Or it could be caused by a merge ahead,” I stubbornly insisted,

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“Those sometimes clog up things for miles and….” “No,” she said. “That’s an accident.” Her certainty annoyed me. I’d recently read that traffic was a river, a stream of cars all moving in relationship with each other, all invisibly connected, and that just one car braking for a piece of wood in the middle of the road thirty miles upstream could ripple backwards, causing freely flowing traffic to clog even if there were no obstacle in sight. “Well,” I said, “It could be an accident, but you don’t know for sure.” “Yes,” she said, “I do, that’s a traffic jam caused by an accident.” “But—” I said—and this went on for miles. She would not even consider that it was not an accident that had caused the traffic jam. She had made meaning of the traffic jam and that was that. She was satisfied that she understood what was happening. I was not so sure. In fact, I was enraged. I always am when people are certain about things you can’t be certain about. It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse to choose certainty over uncertainty. We feel unsafe and unsure in a world whose cause and effects are not known to us. My sister saw a traffic jam. She picked an accident to explain it. But I knew that an accident was just one possibility among many. I was comfortable thinking that an accident was maybe the reason. The problem with maybe, of course, is that maybe doesn’t make meaning. Maybes make sense, but they don’t create a clear path that can claim it will lead us to know what is happening. Maybes create many more paths to not knowing, to uncertainty, than they do to certainty. The need to believe that we can figure out our world and understand its meaning is a tremendous driver for many things, some of them good, some of them bad, some of them the urge to both make and consume timebound art. Where the “maybes” are orchestrated in such a way that when the play or movie ends, they have resolved into certainty and the world makes sense. But make no mistake—all meaning-making involves a selective process where we choose, over and over, to edit out or ignore all the possibilities that don’t fold into and support that meaning. In order to believe in the accident as the sole cause of the traffic, my sister must dismiss construction, a new merge pattern, a piece of wood in the center lane—anything that does not support her belief. Part of a work of art’s task is to seduce the spectator into making these kinds of edits, into ignoring some things and focusing on others. This often involves getting the audience to discount perfectly reasonable reasons for things and lock on to less reasonable things instead. Part of the design behind this selection process is to create a path of significance for the

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spectator to follow, to keep them on track and out of the weeds. But the more profound purpose of the design is to trick the spectator into making assumptions about what the path is and where it is taking them. The design of a timebound work of art gets the audience to obey the laws and principles of the way it makes meaning—even though they will discover, as the work converges into its ending, that they never really understood what they were agreeing to. They don’t understand the meaning they were helping the work relentlessly create until it is too late. Our hunger to discover pattern (meaning) is so strong that we will find it even when there isn’t any. There is even a name for it: Patternicity or Apophenia: The tendency to find patterns where there are none. Evolution favors patternicity because it’s safer to detect a false threat then to ignore a real one. Or, as I’ve said before: we are busy little meaning-making creatures. We will make meaning come hell or high water, so it’s the artists’ job to make the audience make the meaning they want them to. Our relentless desire for meaning is why we will fall so easily for the false pattern a work uses to trap us. We make assumptions we can’t help making, and the craft of the writer is to help us keep making them until the moment when the revelation of right pattern overturns our wrong assumptions. A few years ago, developers created software to look for something called NORA, or non-obvious relationship awareness. They designed the software to look for hidden patterns of unseen relationships between individuals. They originally developed it to uncover collusion between casino employees and patrons, but homeland security snapped the software up. And now they use the software throughout their networks, its data-scrubbing algorithms busily looking for patterns to uncover connections that could indicate threat in federal and commercial databases. In a sense, that software is what a play is, what a movie is, what a work of fiction is. It is a series of instructions given to an audience or reader to allow them to perceive pattern (and all that pattern implies—intent, consequence, meaning) in the work of art they are experiencing. And once they see this pattern, they may be able to use it as a pattern to help them decode the mysteries of their lives. Busy little meaning-making creatures are always looking for templates that can guide them. Narrative meaning-making is different from metaphoric meaningmaking. Narratives generally require creating blinders that allow their

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audiences to focus and shape a path and lock onto it. This means that, as a rule, they narrow the audience’s gaze, making it less likely that the audience member will wander off the track, because a narrative path is one step after the next on a clearly marked trail. The opposite process happens in the knowing/understanding meaning-making that happens with metaphor, and is why metaphoric understanding is so central to the heart of a great dramatic experience. Metaphor expands our gaze and leads us forward, not with a clearly marked path but with the invitation of an ever-opening horizon. Sometimes we forget that meaning is generated by things other than “meaning.” But there is no surprise when meaning means something—so because we require surprise to generate insight, meaning must be made by something else. It is the delivery of the work that makes the meaning available to the audience. Delivery is all. Meaning does not exist without it. A work that wants to or could mean everything means nothing without a way to blossom inside the spectator. The play or movie is that “way.” The play or movie is not the meaning, or the story, or the understanding. It is a delivery system that uses story and understanding to carry the meaning, it is not the meaning. You cannot write something that is all meaning and no delivery system. In both narrative and metaphorical timebound art, the audience must put the pieces of a puzzle together and reject the non-matches. The work of art enables this by making it seem impossible that there is any other way to see things, whether from narrowing and restricting the audience’s gaze in narrative art or expanding it until it changes the entire shape of the landscape in more metaphoric-based work. But either way, it must make the way the puzzle ultimately comes together seem, in retrospect, inevitable. Daniel Levitin, the author of the marvelous book This Is Your Brain, on Music, speaks of what he calls predictable surprise. He says that we get the most delight from predictable and surprising in a pleasing mix—that’s what rhyme is—half predictable, half surprise. But even the predictable part has surprise in it, that’s what’s so hard about it. In retrospect, inevitable is another way of saying predictable surprise. Which is a way of saying that the wellspring, the watch works, the mechanism of a play is in many ways exactly the same as rhyme’s. Which is, of course, one of the things that makes it so hard to write them. Writing a play or movie is not unlike creating a rhyme scheme in a world where it takes two

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hours from the moment the first word is said to the moment its final rhymed mate lands.

Dramatic Doubleness It’s no surprise that irony, the literary term for a certain kind of doubleness, is an essential drug in fiction and in life. Edward St. Aubyn writes in At Last, the final Patrick Melrose novel, that irony is harder to give up than heroin. That we have an addictive need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, that we will do anything to avoid the catastrophe of a fixed meaning. Doubleness is one of the fundamental building blocks and one of the most elemental and profound aspects of timebound art. It is the way a thing can be more than one thing at once that is both mysterious and precise. It is the heart and blood of metaphor, of course—to say one thing and mean another in a way that saying it straight out could never mean. Dramatic doubleness is a form of rhyme that lives in meaning, not in sound. When we talk about something in terms of another, say when we compare thee to a summer’s day, or we walk in beauty like the night, we are borrowing the essence of one thing to give to, and sometimes to create, another thing. We constantly steal the meanings of things and stuff them into other things that we want to share that meaning with. We cut those other meanings off from their previous cause and effect chains and claim them for our own, much in the way that rhyme asserts its ownership when it claims two words for each other. Works of timebound art do this doubling to create their own unique cause and effect chains, their own equations concerning value and meaning. These are essential to a work’s forward strategies and ultimate perception shift. Once doubled, the simplest, most casual things become templates, rules, guides, instructions for whole worlds of understanding. Another way of understanding doubling is to think of it as a trading of essences: doubling is the way we make the inanimate world alive by sharing parts of ourselves with it, while gaining some of its attributes when it shares itself with us. In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, we understand that Laura is like the unicorn, and the unicorn is like her. Whether we identify the unicorn as a symbolic or metaphoric Laura is pretty much unimportant to us, as spectators: we get it. She holds the broken unicorn in her hands, and we see it. They rhyme.

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At the moment when this rhyme lands and we look at the unicorn, we are invited to see and fully understand in a new way just how fragile and how beautiful Laura is. The doubleness is specific—the unicorn’s horn is broken, we get that it’s like Laura’s limp, we understand how little both a glass unicorn and Laura are able to resist the brutalities of life. The play has written the poem of their relationship, it has created the rhyme scheme in which, when Laura stands there, holding the small glass creature, we land with all the emotional satisfaction that a deep formal rhyme can give. We are safe and sure in this doubleness, this meaning. This glass figurine brings an entire mythological essence into the exchange. The unicorn is a symbol of purity, mystical power, and virginity, and these things are now shared with Laura so that she becomes more than herself. And this is the power of doubling. We may think any exchange like this is one sided—we give the essence of our actual aliveness to an object, and get little in return, but it turns out that the objects that we choose for these relationships are often rich with meaning. They may seem like “just things” but reveal themselves, in the embrace of these transactions, to be full vessels that we can drink from deeply. It is important to be aware of the way doubleness organizes our works, because, in the creation of its two-hour language, how things mean what they mean is the way a work manifests what it is about and how it is about it. Most writers construct doubles immediately, as soon as they begin writing. We don’t notice we’re doing it, and the audience doesn’t notice that meaning is being created this way. Doubleness invites us to hold two things simultaneously in our minds. This is what going to the theatre or watching a movie means: we engage with an artificial world but hold the emotions and actions in it to be true.

The Bone Violin The Bone Violin, by Doug Wright, is a tiny gem of a play that resonates with the power and depth of dramatic doubleness. It demonstrates the way a work can create dramatic event and exploit the drive we have to discover connections in the most unlikely and consequently the most surprising and satisfying places. The play’s subtitle is A Fugue for Five Actors, and a fugue is a musical form involving counterpoint. The five actors do function much like a quintet, in a composition of interweaving voices and melodies. But

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fugue is also a mental stage, where a person has a loss of their identity. The play asserts its doubleness in its subtitle. Not all of its audience may know the double meaning of fugue, but those who do have been given an extra Rosetta Stone that allows them to double track the organizing principles of the play. The Bone Violin is the story of a boy who plays his violin until he turns into one. Like all plays, it is a machine that is busy creating the place inside its spectators where, at its end, it will converge and blossom. This will trigger a perception shift in the audience: a new way of seeing and feeling and understanding. And so from the first moments of this fifteen-minute play, it is always working to transform a boy into a violin made out of bone—and to make that transformation both surprising and in retrospect inevitable. This is not terribly easy because like any good rhyme, even the predictable part has surprise in it. This is the contradiction at the heart of the baseline condition of theatrical event. The Bone Violin’s strategy for this transformation happens primarily inside a set of rich, evolving systems that are created by a string of doubles and the resulting and relentless trading and borrowing of essences that are the inevitable result of this doubling. If you are going to transform a child into an inanimate, grotesque object, you will need to set up the path to that transformation so that the audience’s arrival at that destination seems natural, unforced, and inescapable. Wright starts, seemingly innocently, by having the boy’s mother talk about how little she likes classical music. Her dream? Was to be a dog groomer. We are in “contrast double” territory at this point—we’re asked to consider classical music versus the dream of dog grooming. When we do this, there is a trading of their essences. Simple juxtaposition causes this exchange. Words, images, ideas—they all are porous, and they all seep into each other. After all, there is nothing solid in this universe—even a box made out of lead, the densest material we have easy access to, admits the transit of certain waves and particles through its walls. The Mother  When he was born, the first thing I noticed was his hands. The Doctor  The ovum, or the Ivy League? The Mother  Such elegant fingers for a baby. The Doctor  Molecules, or Montessori? Tanglewood or testes? The Father  He’d wrap those little mitts around my thumb, and I knew he wasn’t going to wind up laying bricks.

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The Doctor  Well …? The Mother  It all started in nursery school, during Music Corner. Peter and the Wolf. The Father  Kid hummed it in the tub. The Mother  In his sleep. The Father  With his mouth full. The Mother  By his fourth birthday, he was hounding us for a violin. The Father  I bought him a baseball bat instead. The Mother  A mother expects certain milestones. Tying shoelaces. Scissors. But this? The Father  He took his pocketknife, and his brand new Louisville Slugger … the kid started whittling. The Mother  There were wood chips all over his dungarees. The Father  Scrape, scrape, scrape until … The Mother  Voilà. He’d cared a perfect bow. The Father  So much for Babe Ruth. The Mother  He stole his father’s tennis racket. Stripped the frame and restrung it with fishing line. A homemade violin. The Father  We shoulda known then. The Mother  He had this remarkable gift for—what would you call it? The Professor (dryly) Transformation.

Then the professor states that when he heard the boy play for the first time, he knew just what Pope Julius felt when Michelangelo unveiled the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. This is a deep and essential doubling, as it introduces the spiritual river that runs through the play. These references and doubles are moving the boy, incrementally, imperceptibly, double by double, from a boy to the bone violin. Wright showers us with animal references in order to saturate the boy—who never has a name, he is never given even that much boyness—with an essence that is not human. Even the violin is doubled with things that are not musical instruments, hardwiring their essences and merging them with the sports that a boy is supposed to play.

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The play is telling us exactly where it is going. Its entire journey has been laid out in front of us in the first three minutes. And in that marvelous way that plays work, we will still be surprised by it, we will be unaware that we have welcomed this horrifying ending from the first moments. We have already accepted as possible, even though we know it really isn’t, that a violin and bow can be made from a baseball bat and a tennis racket. A violin made out of a boy’s body is of course completely impossible too. But the impossible has already been made familiar. We have already given it our permission.

Exercise: Track Doubling in The Bone Violin Read The Bone Violin. Circle every single allusion, metaphor, simile, every time the boy is spoken of in non-boy terms, every time a perfectly normal word slides our perception into the non-normal, highlight every contrast double, every time a thing is spoken of by speaking of something else, every time a thing is made out of something that it is not. After you’ve finished, look at your markings on the text.





1. Notice how the doubling, essence-sharing, anthropomorphizing, and de-anthropomorphizing slows down at a point a little less than half-way through the play. From there on out, the doubling will be limited and precise. 2. Pay close attention to the moment when the doubling stops and the narrative takes over. Suddenly we have very little except a step-by-step, quite unadorned narrative of events. The music of the piece changes tone. 3. Track your desire to see the bone violin. Most likely, you do not need to. Or want to. It is an impossible image, so it lives strangest and strongest in our imagination. It is uncanny and disturbing, and we accept that our idea of the bone violin is more powerful than any visual of it could be. We can assume that most of the doubling in the play was done unconsciously—playwrights naturally create metaphoric structures that repeat throughout a play. Beat by beat the boy is less a little boy and more something else. The play heightens this to a lyrically intense degree. The play has artfully scattered its breadcrumbs, and we have eagerly followed them. Once we are deep enough in the forest, the play starts erasing the escape routes behind us, as it herds us along to its inescapable conclusion.

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Doubleness Is Our Most Elegant Tool Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight is an incantation made in doubleness, and it casts its remarkable spell inside a miracle of casting, extraordinary directing, a luminous score by Nicholas Britell, and Jenkins’s relentlessly structured script based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Inside the crucible of these forces a character is created who the audience cares about to an astonishing degree. In each of the three acts of the film, this character is played by a different actor, and has a different name: Little, Chiron, Black. Each iteration of the character is a same/not same. This is one of the ways we are taught to receive the film by structured doubleness. The movie is tightly, exquisitely structured. It has central rhyme schemes that lay out the path of the heart and soul of the film like all good rhymes do—seemingly effortlessly, seemingly inevitably. It is like a sonnet. The rhymes echo and ripple through the film, connecting the present to the past and back again, connecting the film to itself over and over. It feels organic, not contrived. It works the way a piece of music does. Acts One and Three begin the same—a drug dealer is driving in his souped-up coup, with a big gold crown sitting on the dash, diamonds in his ears, big gold watch on his wrist. In Act One, the dealer is Juan. In Act Three, the dealer is Black, exactly following Juan’s pattern. Diamonds in his ears, big gold watch on his wrist. There were so many things about Juan that made us want to try to forgive the fact that he was a drug dealer. We saw his goodness, but it didn’t blind us to the misery he caused. Now we see the character who has claimed our hearts moving through the world exactly the same way Juan did. The same/not same of this rhyme scheme feels inevitable and heartbreaking. We transfer the complicated feelings we had about Juan to Black. We go forward inside this doubleness. We never see Little/Chiron/Black’s mother, Paula, making or giving him a meal. He eats nothing in her house. But whenever someone does give him something to eat—and the three other main characters all do—they sit at the table with him and eat nothing while he eats. It’s a curious image—and its repetition directs our gaze, and says, pay attention. Something important is happening here. The meals become essential offerings, elevated out of the realm of the ordinary—Juan, and Teresa, and Kevin do not have the hunger that Little/Chiron/Black has. They instead have the ability to give him something to satisfy it.

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The ocean is part of the moments of greatest connection in the film. The hunger we have for Little to be cared for lives in every instant of the scene where Juan teaches Little to swim. In Act Two, when Kevin and Chiron kiss and have a brief sexual encounter on the beach, we once again have a great happiness in seeing Chiron with someone he trusts. In Act Three, Black sees the path to the beach as he goes into Kevin’s apartment—we know exactly what he is remembering, and we are filled with hope. In the final moments of the film, there is the sound of the surf as Kevin and Black hold each other. And this pulls the earlier two moments at the beach into this one, it pulls all the longings in the film into this simple embrace. Would this embrace still have moved us if it hadn’t been part of this pattern? Of course. But the rhyme scheme makes all these moments that mattered to us happen all at once in front of us. It’s a magic act. An impossibility of scale. It fits an entire twohour film into an image that lasts less than fifteen seconds. All the repetitions and patterns create an inescapable elegance in the work—its pieces fit perfectly with each other. And then there’s his mother, Paula. Paula is in all three acts, but she has no repeating rhyme scheme. Her narrative is just that—a straight narrative, a progression of events that the film finds impossible or chooses not to link to itself to make meaning. She fights off anyone who tries to mother her son, but she is incapable of mothering him herself. She declares her love throughout the film, but her son is never able to say that he loves her back. It is as if she is almost beyond the structure of the film, as if the power of drugs to destroy a mother’s love also creates a disruption in the film’s poetic rhythm and truth and its ability to repeat and progress its pattern.

Three Surfaces of Doubleness Doubleness for the stage tends to organize our work on three primary surfaces: in the language of the piece (dialogue, images, and gestures), in the details of the narrative, and in the structure that determines how the narrative is told. The first few moments of A Streetcar Named Desire demonstrate doubleness aggressively: Stanley (tossing package of meat, covered with blood, to Stella) Catch!

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Stella (catching package) What? Stanley  Meat!

Stella goes off with Stanley, leaving the raw meat on the table, in full view, not in the ice box. Her neighbor Eunice and the Negro Woman are sitting on the stairs. They laugh. Negro Woman (nudges Eunice with her elbow)  What was that package he threw at her? (She laughs.) Eunice (amused)  You hush now! Negro Woman (imitating Stanley’s gesture of throwing meat)  Catch what! (The women laugh together. Blanche Dubois enters.)

There is no doubt in the audience’s mind what meat means in this context. Because it’s a Williams play and Williams is first and last a poet; his doubleness manifests in visual images—poets almost always have an instinct to move their metaphors into ones we can see on stage when they write a play. And Williams is first and last a playwright, so his doubleness is gestural. We have met Stella and Stanley inside this gesture. Meat has been doubled with sex, and its essence has been transferred to these two characters and to the play. And the meat has made the way ready for Blanche. It precedes her entrance into the world of the play, a herald that announces her arrival. Meat, sex, Blanche—the twinning and juxtaposition is inescapable. Blanche is doubled with meat and sex. And as we will soon discover, she is only entering this world, this trap, because of it—because of her husband’s sexuality, and then, after his death, hers. The play has announced itself to us within its first thirty seconds. It is not hiding anything. Or rather, it is hiding the entire play in plain sight, inside metaphor, inside doubleness.

Language/Visual Image/Gesture We see the meat in a gesture—Stanley throws, Stella catches. We hear the word meat. Then, we hear other people say it too, and clearly, they are saying “we mean meat in the it’s not the meat, it’s the motion kind of meatness.” This invites us to see sex beneath the everyday, the most ordinary of moments of domestic life in this play.

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Narrative/Story The story we have just seen is that when this man brings home the bacon, what he is really bringing home is sex. And inside the double of sex and meat is the hint of something darker. It is a bloody package, thrown at a woman. Additionally, the meat is not put away in the refrigerator, but it is left out on a table. It asserts itself. It is placed center stage because it is center stage, and we forget that at our peril. And last in this sequence of signaling and gesturing and doubling we have the arrival of Blanche DuBois. Who has arrived, heralded by the cause of her destruction—animal appetite.

Structure/Plot We have received, in the use of a package of meat and the voluptuousness of the references multiple characters have made about it, our introduction to the specific language of the play: desire. This is our training for going forward. We are being invited to see desire in terms of other things. This is the most important quality of doubleness. It is the way that a play helps us see what matters to it without constantly, baldly stating it. These doublenesses untie the connections we have to our usual associations of what certain words and images mean and replaces them with the play’s meta-language and logic. Each play’s doubling both creates/is created by its DNA. So, the way a Pinter play doubles is nothing like a Williams play does. It is different in almost every aspect. The opening of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal shows his elegant, effortless rhyme scheme as he brings the word “well” up to the surface of our consciousness and uses its multiple meanings to start carving the Rosetta Stone of the play. Jerry  Well … Emma  How are you? Jerry  All right. Emma  You look well. Jerry  Well, I’m not all that well, really.

And just a few beats later:

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Jerry  Funny lot, painters, aren’t they? Emma  They’re not at all funny.2

Even if we missed the “wells” we get it now. And both these moments prepare us for the moment, just a few more lines later, when the play announces itself, where it truly begins: Emma  Ever think of me? Jerry  I don’t need to think of you. Emma Oh? Jerry  I don’t need to think of you.3

Three times in a row, the play has told us: things mean two things. This is code learning that is simple and virtually invisible. A word with two or more meanings is a readymade pun, and from the time we are children we have taken delight in puns. It’s not just because they are a form of rhyme, but because they are transgressive. Schoolchildren giggle insanely at words that mean two things because they are like a kind of dirty secret. For one word to have two meanings breaks the rules of meaning. But Pinter’s masterful, very simple, very breezy doubling is not just candy—it is teaching us how to see many things in the play: the two couples, and their off-pairings, the two times: past and present, the two sets of children and the two homes and the flat, which is not a home but longs to be one—all these things are rhymed constantly.

Language/Visual Image/Gesture We hear characters using the words “well” and “funny” and “think” multiple times in multiple ways, and our ear hears all the same/not sames, like repeated notes played each time on a different instrument. It teaches us that the same note is not always the same note and to pay attention: it might be its twin.

Narrative/Story All those “wells” make us think we are listening to a hesitant, awkward, difficult conversation, which of course we are. Inside the doubled “funny” is the hint of something darker. And the three lines that load and fire the

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double “think” tell us an entire history—we know in a second a thousand things about these two people. These puns tell us part of the story with a breathtaking economy and elegance.

Structure/Plot We have received, in the use of these three ordinary, everyday words, the code that is our training for going forward. As in Streetcar, we are being invited to see things in terms of other things. Not all plays need to or can replace our relationships with words quite the way a Pinter play does—his plays use/are a kind of pair of sharp scissors that cut the invisible strings that attach words to our solid ideas about them. Pinter’s scissors hollow out the meanings of the most ordinary of words and fill them with quiet threat and sculpted hidden uncertainties, because once we have entered the world of a Pinter play, we are not allowed to trust our previous relationships with even these small words. And this is one of the reasons why it is easy for Pinter to move his audience where he wants to. We are not as anchored to our old ways of seeing//knowing// understanding as we were when we walked into the theatre and naively sat down. Character is how and what Martin McDonagh doubles in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, since the machine that he is building is working to create a masterful character doubling. McDonagh transforms not just the literal Maureen into Mag but the mistaken Maureen that we had constructed though our incorrect assumptions as well. McDonagh doubles constantly and structurally. His equivalents of Pinter’s “well” and Williams’ “meat” almost always flow out of character traits—their forgetfulness, or senility, or stupidity. They are all beautifully executed running gags, all of which support the play’s final perception shift—the reveal of Maureen as Mag—so that at the end of the play, after Maureen has killed her mother and gotten away with it and is sitting in the rocking chair where her mother sat, just as confused, just exactly like her mother, it will seem completely, effortlessly inevitable. It will seem—but not until the end—that we should have seen this coming all along. Because McDonagh is pretty much a genius at this sort of doubling, the only characters whose names are not switched to someone else’s are Mag and Maureen, the characters who will literally double each other at the end of the play. During the play, no one will be able to keep the names of the other characters straight. All the doubling flows into the heart of the play’s

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fundamental machinery—the confusion about who is the loon, who is taking care of who. This is the way McDonagh goes about preparing his trap. McDonagh’s amusing, deceptively comedic doubling creates patterns that reveal the deepest nature, the DNA of his play.

Language/Visual Image/Gesture, and Narrative/ Story, and Structure/Plot All three happen together. McDonagh does not double to recalibrate our preexisting relationships with words in general, the way Pinter does, or create a precise system like desire that will expand to embrace the entire play the way Williams does. There is no doubling on the top surface of ordinary language in this play, unless the words in question are proper nouns, so we’ll find nothing meaningful in separating out the three surfaces here. But that doesn’t mean that the doubling in this play isn’t exquisite. McDonagh is on the hunt for transformation, a transformation that is a bit like Doug Wright’s in The Bone Violin: a similar relentless machinery makes it possible. Early in the play, Pato’s brother Ray makes his appearance. He’s come to deliver an invitation to Maureen, who isn’t home. Ray  I’ve done enough wading. Coming up that oul hill. Mag  It’s a big oul hill. Ray It is a big oul hill. Mag Steep. Ray  Steep is right and if not steep then muddy. Mag  Muddy and rocky. Ray  Muddy and rocky is right.4

It’s an echo chamber with these two. It’s an odd doubling that makes two wildly different characters same/not same. But Ray is also used to introduce the central running gag that cascades through the play: the character name confusions. He says he’s thinking of buying a used car. Mag  Off somebody. Ray  Oul Father Welsh—Walsh—has a car he’s selling, but I’d look a poof buying a car off a priest. Mag  I don’t like Father Walsh—Welsh—at all.

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Father Welsh, the local priest, is constantly called both Father Welsh and Father Walsh. Ray mentions that his uncle is going back to Boston. Ray  … and taking those two ugly-duckling daughters with him and that Dolores whatyouall, Healy or Hooley …5

Dolores Healy, Pato’s cousin from America, might be Dolores Hooley, according to Ray, our least reliable character, in which case, Ray says, it would only take one letter to change her name should she marry Pato— Hooley to Dooley. The narrative work that this seemingly harmless riff on Dolores’ name does is astonishing. We are being told the story of the entire play—Pato will marry Dolores Healy or Hooley, and her name will be changed to Dooley, whether it will take one letter to change it or three. The play is hiding nothing from us. It tells us everything—and it knows we won’t really hear it. But we will remember this exchange, because it is so stupidly charming. And the play also knows that when we hear that Dolores Hooley has married Pato, it will seem inevitable because of this exchange. A world where not just words but people are doubled throughout prepares us organically for the final perception shift, when Maureen becomes Mag. And we never notice any of this as important work—it’s marvelous sleight of hand. The comedy cloaks it completely, while the play uses our laughter to move us relentlessly into position to spring the trap. In Streetcar, Betrayal, and Beauty Queen—meat to desire, well to well, Welsh to Walsh—these doubles are smaller “doubles” of the larger double that is the play’s design. They create a path we can follow easily.

A Play Within a Play Is Structural Doubleness A play within a play is a conceit that occupies the real-not-real territory of a theatrical event, the very center of doubleness. The King of the Yees, Lauren Lee’s comedy about family and Chinese American identity and the nature of story, begins inside the rehearsal for a play within a play in the Yee Fung Toy Family Association Hall. There is a character called Larry Yee, played by Actor 1, and a character called Lauren Yee, played by Actor 2. But a few minutes into the rehearsal, the “real” Larry enters and immediately stumbles and falls onto the stage, hurting his foot. The “real” Lauren appears and goes to her father’s aid. Larry

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sits on the stage and introduces himself to the actors and the audience, and immediately starts talking about the Yee Fung Toy Family Association. He’s so proud to be a Yee. He’s so proud of Lauren—not just her play but everything about her. He tells one of the actors: Larry  She’s been married two years … and nine months. Lauren  No, I haven’t. Larry (to us, nods.)  And nine months.

Who is telling the truth? And if it’s not the truth, why aren’t they telling it? Is Larry lying on purpose, or by accident? Did Lauren lie to her father about being married? We immediately start looking for answers to these questions. We are being trained to look not simply for who is telling the truth, but what that truth, if we find it, means. Meanwhile, Larry is surprised to find out that he’s a character in his daughter’s play. He looks at the actor playing him. Larry  Looks just like me! (Actor 1 doesn’t look like Larry at all.) (to us.) Larry  Which is me? Which is him? No idea!6

It’s an extraordinarily potent moment. It couldn’t be more centered in the very heart of this play about identity—and of course, it doesn’t play that way at all. It plays as a perfect little character moment—is Larry blind, is he trying to compliment the actor, or is he just trying to make us laugh? Whatever the “truth,” he’s charmed us. It’s a delightful destabilization. The play has gotten us to let go of our standard idea of truth and taught us to replace it with whatever Larry Yee says it is. Larry tells the actors that he works on the campaign for State Senator Leland Yee, who is running for office. Actor 2  Are you his campaign manager? Lauren  He’s a volunteer. Larry  I’m THE volunteer. Lauren  It means he doesn’t get paid. Larry  That’s ok. Serve the community! Actor 2  We don’t get paid either!7

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This is a lovely doubleness. It is a way to make both the play within the play that these actors are in and the play we are seeing something that is serving the community. Larry tells everyone that he is a big supporter of Senator Leland. But Lauren keeps shooting him down. Lauren  Just because he’s a Yee. Larry  NO. (Beat.) Though also yes. Because I’m a Yee. And the senator’s a Yee. Also because he’s our cousin. Lauren  He’s not our cousin.8

“NO. (Beat.) Though also yes.” This is delightful comedic doubleness that is a gorgeous summation of facts and how the play feels about them, of the way that family ties and a sense of belonging is here seen as more important than any literal truth. A string of doubleness starting with the two Laurens and the two Larrys, all of it charming, has entertained us and marked out the territory of the play precisely. We are at the fifteen-minute mark of the play, and it has taught us how to move forward through it.

Systems When doubling accumulates in a timebound work of art, it creates a chain of same/not sames that makes a path through it that is easy to follow. The audience is rewarded for following it with the pleasure of the familiarity we always have with a running gag or rhyme scheme, looking forward to the next time a match will occur. This is a kind of nextness that creates a way to move forward in a work that is not just story based but is a path built inside the work’s structure. We call these paths systems. A system is a collection of moments that exist in relationship to each other. Systems are made up of repeating, evolving sets of elements—visual signal and images, metaphors and concepts, dialogue and action. Singularly, seen in isolation away from their repeated set, these moments are nothing structural. But when they repeat and connect to each other, they connect a work to itself by putting multiple moments of it in relationship with each other. This connectedness flows through a work. A system is a way of creating value from information, it teaches us how to listen to a work. It teaches us what matters.

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It’s not just that a thing is repeated throughout a work that makes it a system, though repetition is both inevitable and necessary. As a system grows and enfolds more and more of a work, it progresses and turns, sometimes by transformation and revelation, sometimes just by accumulation. A system’s gravitational pull reaches out and attracts like things to it. When the mass of a system gets big enough, it can be strong enough to pull an entire play or film into its orbit. The nature of language itself has trained us for the way repetition confers value. All language is highly redundant because when someone speaks, words fly past so fast and it is difficult to grab hold of all of their meaning. One solution to this problem is giving the listener more than one chance to “get it.” We learn, early on, to repeat the things that are most important to us, to make sure they are heard. But what really helps us make sense of what we are hearing are rules about sentence order, the agreement between noun and verb, and the laws about tense that put words into established sequences and relationships. These rules are patterns coded into language. We call these patterns grammar, and we count on them to provide handholds to meaning-making. They are a kind of structural Rosetta Stone, and inside that structure we can process and understand what is being said faster and more accurately. Timebound works create their own kind of grammar. A movie or play’s grammar, of course, will not be about sentence structure and moment-tomoment meaning but about the entire meaning structure. Systems are a large part of what creates this grammar. The best way to explain anything in a timebound work of art is to explain it in the context of one.

Systems in Six Timebound Works of Art We will start with a small but vibrant system in Fleabag: the hair system. It runs though both seasons like a true running gag, skipping like a stone across the surface of the work, giving us familiar handholds along the way. This system makes it easy to grab hold of important moments and gives us a sense of intimacy with Fleabag and Claire, letting us engage with their choices while taking pleasure in the expectation of setup and payoff that happens with all running gags.

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We are continually asked to see Fleabag and Claire’s hair as more than just hair. The hair system is foregrounded early in the first season when we learn that Claire always does crazy things with her hair when she has PMS—so hair is introduced inside the larger conversation about being a woman that is central to the series. During the flashback of their mother’s funeral, Fleabag complains that no matter what she does, her hair just keeps “falling in a chic way.” Claire says that the Sexy Lawyer is not interested in her because she’s “having a bad hair day.” So, the ripples of “hair” embrace much of what we will discover is important to the series. Whenever a moment about hair happens, we connect it to the previous moments involving hair exactly the same way we connect rhyming words to each other. And since things run backward as well as forward in art—our memories, which are made in the past and of the past, are constantly re-seen and rewoven in the present moment when things repeat—these ripples make all their past moments live in the present tense whenever a hair moment comes to the surface, just the way a rhyme lives in every setup and payoff that has established it. A system, in this way, connects a work of timebound art to itself over and over again. And while we might think that hair is frivolous and inconsequential, it is a place where some of the most important parts of the work are anchored, and where they expand. One of the primary longings that most audience members have is for Fleabag and Claire to stop fighting and figure out how to love each other. When Claire asks Fleabag for help after her tragic haircut, Fleabag rushes to her side and fights for her sister, an act of true love at the hair salon. But Klare, the man Claire is in love with, loves her hair cut—that’s how we know that they are meant for each other. In the last episode, Claire removes the hair extension that was an attempt to normalize her haircut and runs away from her father’s wedding to be with the man she loves. This is what is so dynamic about systems. The hair system lives everywhere in the series, in love and joy and pain and loss. A system is the way that a work communicates with itself and with us without fatiguing us by seeming to repeat itself constantly. It is repeating itself constantly—but in charming or amusing or in transforming or in same/not same ways, so we don’t notice or mind. And this is how a work carries its deepest self up to the surface throughout its length. This makes systems one of the most effective ways that a work hides itself in plain sight. They are often made up of things that we notice so easily that we often aren’t even aware that we are noticing them, and our attention can be shaped and focused without our knowledge. Over the duration of a work,

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systems matter more and more, and their cumulative meaning leads us to the heart of the piece. Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel’s primary system is fabric and clothing. Esther is a seamstress, and there is fabric everywhere—Esther sews fancy corsets and a silk smoking jacket and on her bed is a patchwork quilt filled with the money she’s saved from eighteen years of sewing. Fabric lives in every corner of the play. Cloth is not just cloth in this play. It is part of a moving river of work and dreams and desire, letting the most passionate parts of the play flow easily between characters and into events, connecting them all. A piece of clothing is easy for an audience to see, to know, and to understand its true and specific value. When we know the value of a thing, we feel we are in good hands. The cloth system shows us what matters, it shows us what to look at. It effortlessly shapes our gaze. But the cloth system is actually building/is a part of another system, the one that lives at the heart of the play: touch. Esther and virtually all the women in the play long to be touched. The fancy corsets are all made to make a man desire the woman who wears them, the smoking jacket is a gift to Esther’s new husband made out of her love for him, and her patchwork quilt is ripped open and the money given to him because Esther is desperate for him to stay in her bed. Touch is the shadow system that the cloth system has carried to us, without our entirely conscious knowledge of it. In her last scene with Mr. Marks, a Jewish cloth merchant, Esther gives him the smoking jacket she had made for her husband. He slips it on, and she asks if he will let her touch him to fit it, even though she knows his religion forbids it. He allows it. It is the barest of touches—and it is more powerful, to the audience who longs desperately for it, than a full, passionate embrace. It is a touch filled with everything Esther is—her longing to love, her skills as a seamstress, her acceptance of the limitations of the world but her courage to face it anyway. This is the moment of Esther and Mr. Marks’ union—he is wearing the bridegroom’s jacket, and her light touch, through its fabric, is their only embrace. In the final scene, Esther puts her hand on her stomach, and we understand from this touch, rather than from a line of dialogue, that she is pregnant. Systems are much more similar to motifs in music than they are to story points. In music, repeated patterns make it easier for us to process what we hear—the motifs become familiar, so we don’t have to slow down to process and make sense out of every part of a given section of music. There are those who believe that the modern, hypercomplex music of atonal composers

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(Pierre Boulez, e.g.) often contains too many non-redundant events per unit of time, and the lack of redundancy overwhelms the listener’s processing capacities. They get lost. Like theme and variation in music, a system turns and changes so it is slightly different each time we encounter it, and it has the same/not same quality as a rhyme scheme. This means systems engage us as an audience member the way structure always does—with the security of knowing the experience is patterned, allowing it to organize our anticipation reliably. These repeating rhyming same/not sames shape our gaze, tone the work, and organically show us what has value. Every time Esther touches a piece of cloth at Mr. Mark’s store, and the time she just barely touches him; every time she touches a client while she is fitting their clothing; every time she longs for her husband’s touch; and the final moment of the play, when, with the smallest of touches, she indicates her unborn child—the play is building/revealing its most important system. The system of the desire for love in its physical form, whether passionate sex or just human touch, registers in the audience, by the end of the play, as the path through the true territory we have traveled. Nottage has built a deep and resonant understanding by weaving it out of the whole cloth of the entire play. A strong central system like Nottage’s gives a play an internal structure that is alive, that transforms with every repetition moment to moment while remaining familiar, and that is wholly its own. It is an organizing principle for the experience and at the same time becomes a stable, safe place for the audience. When they see its parts in any form, they intuit that they’re someplace central to the heat of the work, and this makes them feel that they’re paying attention to the right things. Strong systems shape and direct the audience by earning its trust. We know we will be charmed, or moved, or amazed by these elements when they return again. Sam Shepard’s Buried Child hides itself in plain sight in multiple, various ways, in gesture and visual image. There are objects on stage—the corn, the carrots, the roses—which belong to the farm/earth system, but they are building another system that is the center of the play. While the fabric in Intimate Apparel is creating context and space for touch to blossom, in Buried Child we witness a repeated gesture that calls to other gestures and to almost every other visual element and action on stage. The corn, the carrots, and the roses are all cradled in someone’s arms. Exactly the way a baby is, and the way the buried child is cradled at the end of the play. When the play finally reveals the buried child, we realize we have always been headed to this moment. The play has been showing us the baby almost since the moment it

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began. The baby system—in not just this primary cradling gesture but also Dodge’s constant cry for his bottle and his blanket, all the references to milk, especially the special status of the milking stool—runs through every part of the play. Again, this is because one of a system’s most valuable traits is that we can see what a play is about all the time without “seeing” it—when a system is up and operating, flowing into the work, in its objects, images, actions, and desires, we are fully engaged and are carried along with it. The play can create and sustain its self-similarity over time, displaying its true self for its entire length without ever reducing itself to any one thing, or giving itself away, or revealing the tricks it has up its sleeve. Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsey-Abaire, is a stunning example of this. Becca and Howie are mourning their four-year-old boy, Danny, who was killed when he chased his dog into the street. His parents struggle to live in the wake of his death. Everywhere they look there is a reminder of him—his clothes, the food he liked to eat, the sheets with robots from his bed, the VCR with a video of him on it. Everything reminds them of him. Memory in the play is a system that flows into and supports the play’s primary organizing system: motherhood. The play is filled with mothers, and every child we hear about doubles with Danny, each child is an echo of their lost son. Becca’s mother, Nat, has also lost a son—Arthur, a heroin addict who killed himself. The boy who was driving the car that hit Danny arrives, and he doubles with Danny as well. And this allows LindsayAbaire’s play to talk about Danny all the time without talking about him. Part of the beauty of this play is that this constant doubling is ultimately a double of the way that grief itself works—when we lose someone, they are everywhere we look. This is one of the most powerful ways that writers make work matter to their audiences. Systems and doubling have the ability to connect the audience’s lives to the lives they see in front of them without making it necessary for the audience to “identify with” or “see themselves” in the characters. Our histories do not need to match those of the characters on stage or on the screen. We do not need to have lost a child to feel the power of these characters’ loss when we watch Rabbit Hole. Instead, systems repeat and rhyme and create a path that connects us inside the act of following it. We have a relationship with the heart of Rabbit Hole that is not “just” a story we have been told but something we have assembled from a collection of intimate impressions made in real time. In this play, love and memory and loss accumulate and progress in experience and meaning.

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And inside the motherhood system and the doubling/rhyming that makes it so robust, there is a final utility. When Nat tells Becca about how the grief she feels for her son Arthur is a brick in her pocket, a weight, yes, but a comfort too, because grief is what a mother who has lost a child gets to have instead of her son—the brick doubles not just Danny and Arthur but the two mothers as well. Becca’s rage at her mother for daring to suggest that her grief for Arthur—a grown man who hanged himself—should be valued as much as hers for Danny—a child hit by a car—finds a way to dissolve inside this breathtakingly simple metaphor. They are both mothers who have this weight to carry instead of a son, and Becca sees that her mother’s loss is as heavy as her own. The motherhood system at last expands to allow them both to find comfort in each other. This is a resolve that the play and its audience need badly. Theatrically, as well as dramatically, Danny lives in the things he has left behind. His absence has been doubled by a rich system of objects. So even though we never see the brick, at the moment Nat tells Becca about it and for the rest of the play, we imagine that we do see it. It’s important for us to understand that the brick’s agency, which is to be an extraordinary metaphor for absence that we carry away with us when we leave the theatre, is being “constructed” every time Danny’s absence is evoked by a physical object—his robot sheets, his clothes they can’t quite give away, his dog who won’t stop barking. The brick speech would have been moving and effective without this system functioning in the play. But it would not be as solid. It lives and blossoms in the system that created it. It is that most magical of theatrical sleight of hands—a metaphor we can almost touch, because we have been taught how to assemble it during the course of the play. We have built it inside us. By looking at the whiskey system in Long Day’s Journey into Night, we can see how a system can create a moving river of progression and variation so that a four-hour play may cover the same territory in an endless repeat and not feel repetitious because systems always transform. In most plays, alcohol is used to get characters drunk, or to escape truth or self, or to bust up the place. In this play, whiskey flows through the play becoming a part of every one of the characters’ central hopes and fears, carrying them into view where we can see them. Whiskey is a container of Tyrone’s cheapness when he keeps it under lock and key, Jamie’s dissolute life and hatred for his father when he sneaks it and then waters it down, a way for everyone including Edmund to avoid the truth of his illness, and when

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Mary uses it to bribe her underpaid household staff, a way for her to try to create the home she longs for and knows she can never have. We see the whiskey. It is not just an idea, or a concept, or an emotion—it is a physical object that we can see. Whiskey is a perfect example of the way that something can be part of multiple systems in a play. Every time whiskey surfaces in the play as part of one of the four primary systems—Tyrone’s stinginess, Mary’s desire for a real home, Jamie’s rebellion, and Edmund’s denial of his TB—it recalls all the other ways that whiskey is used. All these systems rhyme with each other and call to each other the way rhymes do. As the play progresses, these rhymes accumulate, piling up on each other, constantly folding and refolding. When a play has this constant quality of its moments folding in on themselves like this, everywhere the audience looks they are looking at all its parts at once. It’s as if the play becomes a kind of layer cake, and no matter how huge this cake becomes, no matter what piece of it you choose, you will be getting everything the cake is made of in every bite. Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present is organized by a deceptively simple system: naming. The company of actors who are doing the Presentation about the genocide of the Herero have found a box of letters from the German soldiers who served in Sudwestafrika. These letters were written to their wives and sweethearts. They appear to be the only hard historical evidence the group has—they aren’t happy about that, of course, because they don’t want documentation about the Germans, they want documentation about the Herero. But the letters are what they’ve got. They try to read one of them. They can’t pronounce the name of the German woman it’s written to. Someone says, “oh, just call her Sarah.” They try to read another letter—same problem. The group decides to call her Sarah, too. They decide to call all the women the letters are addressed to “Sarah.” It’s a stunning moment of doubling, because now the women— all these white women—have been made the same. One of the letters to Sarah is from a soldier telling her that he has named a tree Sarah, because its shade is so wonderful. This doubling is another turn in the power and shape of naming. Another moment when the naming system enlarges. The company is upset that the letters are from white men, sent to white women; that they are love stories between white people when what they want are stories about the Herero. The lack of stories or any hard evidence about

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the genocide of the Herero makes an actor say that it’s not like the welldocumented Holocaust. And so the system expands exponentially inside this contrast doubling—the twentieth century’s first and almost completely undocumented genocide is now in relationship with the twentieth century’s most documented one. Actor 1  Six million people And we know all of their names. Every single one. And— Actor 2   We don’t know the Herero names. Actor 1 Exactly. Actor 4  But that doesn’t mean they weren’t murdered.9

Inside the agency of this doubling, every known name of the six million becomes, in an extraordinary sleight of hand, a place holder, a signifier, the representation of each unnamed Herero. The murdered Jews and the murdered Herero exist now in a strange, impossible equivalency. But this is not the name system’s ultimate destination. A German solider is writing to his dear Sarah back in Germany—white Sarah. Behind him, a Black Man and a Black Woman run under a tree when it starts to rain. White Sarah writes to her soldier back about running under a tree in the rain. And then: Black Man  Dear Sarah. White Man  Dear Sarah. Black Man  Dear, dear Sarah. White Man  Do you remember when it rained? Black Woman  I love the rain.10

It’s a breathtaking moment. The love stories that so excluded the Africans have now expanded to include them—the Black Woman is Sarah too; she is inside the story of the letters, the only pieces of historical truth, it is now their story, their truth, and the white Sarah and the White Man slip away from our attention. At the end of the scene, the Black Man asks the Black Woman, his Sarah, to marry him. She says yes. The story that the letters tell has changed. It now belongs to the Herero.

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At the end of the play, the box of letters is the last thing on stage. The box contains all the things that are true and all the things that aren’t, all the white women and all black women who are and who are not named Sarah, all the unnamed Herero who were murdered in Namibia, the named who perished in the Holocaust, and every black man and woman who has been lynched in Africa or America and everywhere in between. The box is made out of all desires we have to understand racism and its tragedies, and the desire to honor and remember its victims. The gravitational pull of the name system has filled this box with real historical artifacts and not real ones, and conspired with us to mean all this, and make it happen inside us. The box has helped make us a witness to all the crimes we saw, and a partner to all the play’s desires.

Pleats Great timebound works are simultaneously constant generators of/and constantly being generated by their deep systems. Writers instinctually create systems that organize the audience’s experience so that a work is made out of itself on every scale. Repeated patterns and an elegant set of systems work as gravity wells that pull a work into and through itself over and over again. The result is that timebound works tend to align themselves in pleats. In Fleabag, each event that involves or references hair exists in relationship with all the other events and references about hair, creating a connection of moment seven with moment seventeen with moment eighteen with moment thirty-two that draws these moments together, the way that a pleated fan collapses the space between folds. In this way, a play or film collapses time. We have the same effect with the whiskey in Long Day’s Journey, fabric in Intimate Apparel, and the baby in Buried Child—all these systems are a series of pleats. They call to their other parts during a play and pull them together almost as if obeying emotional magnetic poles. Movies often have less of this pleating than plays do because they are more relentlessly narrative in their construction. Works like Fleabag, Moonlight, and The Pirates of the Caribbean (with its incredibly precise use of magical objects to organize every action) are able to exploit the strengths of both artforms—all the pleating they want, and at the same time using all of the visual precision and tonal control that make work on the screen so satisfying, all the while nested in a secure long-arc narrative form. A narrative work often does not receive its power and create its paths of significance by just

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doubling back on itself constantly—it has a relentless forward track to follow. Compare an action movie—Die Hard, Snowpiercer, anything staring Dwayne Johnson—with a film whose movement folds in on itself like Memento or Arrival, and you can easily see this structural difference.

Exercise: Pleating Fold a piece of paper along lines, as if you are making a fan. Then, close the fan, so that all of the edges of the folds are touching all the other edges. This is the way that systems put all the parts of your work in relationship with all the other parts. Pleating in a work can make all its parts connect. Try tearing the fan now that it’s folded up and all the pleats are lined up with each other. It’s practically impossible. A page folded once or twice can easily be torn but not an entire page folded this way. A chemical bond occurs when substances are held together by the attraction of atoms to each other through sharing or exchanging of essences. The way systems function in timebound art is exactly like that.

Systems seem to be generated effortlessly in our artform, because when we write, we create them unconsciously. Systems appear to collect themselves. We don’t need to be (and probably cannot be) aware of them when we’re writing a script—at least, in the beginning of the process when they are collecting themselves—but they are valuable to identify when we are rewriting. They can help us sense the way the entire work exists in relation to itself, and we will be able to rewrite it less disastrously. Think of a neural network, a superhighway exchange, a spider’s web. The more threads you have that are interconnected, the more “made out of itself ” your work will be. Everything is anchored into everything else. In timebound art, everything is a setup for something that matters, everything is either part of a track that the train is traveling on or part of the cargo that the train is carrying, or—in really good timebound art—both. Systems are a kind of lacing that pulls all the edges of a work together, tighter and tighter like a corset, because that’s what systems do.

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System and Theme A theme is what a work is about, and a system is how it is about those things. When we speak about the relationship of system and theme, we are speaking about how works generate meaning, about how they mean what they mean. The theme of Intimate Apparel is certainly not fabric any more than Buried Child is about the perils of cradling produce in your arms. But theme is created by these systems when they help carry the play across the footlights where it is received by the audience. Theme can’t be put on stage or screen—it is created in the audience. Ernest Hemingway supposedly once said, when asked if the fish in The Old Man and the Sea were a symbol or allegory for Christ: “The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse. There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. But I knew that if I made the man and the boy and the fish and shark true enough, they would mean many things to many people.”11 To speak of the theme of a work is to talk about the thing the work creates, and not the things that create it. Thinking about theme as generated product rather than something that exists on stage or screen is a hard adjustment to make, because most of us have been taught to think of theme and meaning as the primary and most important way to talk about word-based works of art. We’ve been rewarded from the time we were in high school for reading for theme. But here we’re interested in how theme and meaning are generated. Not what a work means but how it means it. And that’s a different conversation. A system creates the connections and patterns that generate both the theme and the world where it has resonance and value. Systems are one of the ways that what is important about a work becomes important to us. A system happens totally in the work itself, on stage or screen—it is not generated product, it does the generating. Theme and meaning exist almost entirely in the audience. They are created in each audience member by their reception of the work. The ultimate utility of systems is that we can see theme being generated all the time without seeing it—when a system is up and operating, flowing into the entire work, we engage with what is creating the theme without being clubbed over the head with it. Stanley Elkin, the novelist and essayist, used to say, when a writer too clearly spelled out their themes: “Why are you getting up in my face?”12 And there is the famous quote, attributed to both Moss Hart and Samuel Goldwyn: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” The theme is not a message. You are writing a play to mean something to your audience,

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but you are not writing an essay, you are making a work of art. Themes and meaning are generated products, assembled in the minds, hearts, and, when we are very lucky, in the souls of our audience. Okkie Brownstein says that “a play is not a statement about the world but an experienced perception of it. … [A]‌small revolution in the spectator’s soul.”13 Meaning is heavy, but systems move through a work of timebound art like air, like water. How delightful the argument about cucumber sandwiches in the first scene of The Importance of Being Earnest. It costs the audience nothing to be charmed by it. But the cucumber sandwiches are one of the play’s most sparkling Trojan horses—and we invite this system in without even noticing that to speak of these trivial sandwiches is to speak about class and that without our knowledge or consent we have welcomed in one of the primary systems that organizes the entire play. It is a system that will lead us effortlessly to the important reveal about importance at the end of the play. And so a play gets to generate meaning in a language that we easily hear and understand, and that we receive eagerly and allow to accumulate. Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children has a system that organizes the entire play with elegant, horrifying economy. The play manages to be about itself relentlessly without ever seeming to repeat itself. At the start of the play, Rose appears at Hazel and Robin’s door. We have no idea why, and neither does Hazel. Hazel believed that Rose had died of cancer some time ago. But here she is. There is blood all over her blouse— her nose is bleeding. Hazel tries to clean her up, to stop her bleeding. This seemingly straight forward system—the body, aging, sickening, breaking, and how we strive to protect and repair it—is the play to such a degree that we don’t even realize how it is functioning. But it has announced itself immediately and organizes the entire play. There are perhaps ten or twenty sentences in the play that do not flow in or out of this system of the body and our need to protect and heal it—even the talk about Hazel and Robin’s children will ultimately reveal itself to be this conversation at its core. Kirkwood uses a structure of small reveals and perception shifts throughout the play to move us relentlessly forward, but everything happens inside this system of the body. It’s breathtaking. It hides all that truly matters in the play in plain sight. Gradually, we understand why Rose has come: a deadly atomic reactor meltdown has occurred, and she has come to collect Robin—Hazel’s husband, but once her lover—to go with her to join the volunteers who have

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decided to sacrifice themselves to try to stabilize the reactor and protect “the children.” What is so stunning and effective about the play is how deep and broad the primary system is and how the audience is both totally aware and unaware of it. While they have been watching what looked like a love triangle play, putting together the reveals and watching as choices were made, the system that is the play has been busy making it possible for its themes to expand to include incredibly important choices in the world to which we return when the curtain comes down at the end of the play. This is not a play about a love triangle but about our responsibility to all our children and each other. The love triangle was the Trojan Horse that got us to look at the right thing in the wrong way. It turns out that we have two kinds of attention. Top down: what we want to focus on, and bottom up: what takes us by surprise. Systems satisfy both. With their repeated patterns and accumulating value, they give us something we know how to focus on, while still surprising us in their endless variations, as they share essences and deepen and evolve.

Exercise: Tracking Systems in A Streetcar Named Desire As you read Streetcar, track all the mentions and moments involving light in all the different ways they occur (don’t include stage directions about how light or dark the set is—we’re interested in the poetry, not the mechanics here). To get you started, here are a few examples so that you can see that light happens in story, in image, and in action onstage:

Blanche describes a blazing searchlight that went out forever when her husband shot himself. ● Stella for star ● The moment when Blanche stands in Stella’s light ●

When you gather all the moments clustering around and inside light, you will have a radically different relationship with the play than you had before. Did Williams create this astonishing system on purpose? I doubt it. I assume it just happened, that each moment called to the next. Accumulation and value happened inside his great gift as a poet and playwright.

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Tone Shifts When an audience engages with a work of timebound art, they fill their pockets with the things about the work they want to remember, things they think are important. They have an attachment to these things. These things are like puppies, in a way—the audience picked them out from the other puppies available because there was something irresistible about them. When the tone of a work changes, it tells the audience—forget about those irresistible puppies. Empty out your pockets, from now on you’re going to fill them up with full-grown Doberman Pinchers instead. Well, the audience doesn’t like that, they like the puppies they already have, they bent down, they coaxed them into their pockets, they’re comfortable with them. Yet, with most modern comedies, and some of our best dramas, the tone at the end of the work is fundamentally different than the beginning and middle—it’s darker or more dangerous or bleak. But it doesn’t disrupt the audience and the way they are engaging with the work. How do we manage this magic act? Well, we don’t tell them to get rid of those puppies. We don’t change the tone. Instead, at the end of the work when the perception shift happens and the audience reaches into their pockets, they will discover that they aren’t filled with irresistible puppies at all. They’re filled with snakes. And they were the one who filled their pockets with them. Martin MacDonaugh’s plays excel at this. Their tone hasn’t changed, but the audience’s reception and understanding of it has. We subliminally understand that the tone of a play is the play. So, when there is a tonal shift, there is the danger that we can become disoriented, because when this kind of change happens, the play becomes, in some fundamental way, a different play. At a certain point in the experience, we have an established relationship with a work’s tone, and we rely on it to help us make our way in a work of timebound art. It’s a kind of invisible map or music that we feel more than we hear. We can get lost if the map suddenly shows a different territory, or if the music changes from a waltz to a tango. Some plays use a tone shift structurally. Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 has a radical tone shift between acts—when the curtain comes up on Act Two and all the actors are playing different characters in a different time and space, we realize that the world has completely shifted and all our anticipations must now be shifted and transformed as well. But the new tone in Act Two does not suffer a downgrade. True, it is not as jewel studded with transgressive

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energy as Act One. But the audience doesn’t mind the adjustments required to shift from the delicious, transgressive nastiness of the tone of Act One to a naturalistic, domestic tone in Act Two. Instead, they’re thrilled by it. Cloud 9’s second act not only hijacks and transforms Act One’s tone but transforms it in a brilliantly simple theatrical and dramatic way. Churchill casts “against” gender, race, and age in Act One and then recasts the actors more “appropriately” in Act Two. It’s a device that hits the refresh button on our attention constantly one way in Act One, another in Act Two. In Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, Anne Washburn’s three-act play about a travelling troupe performing remembered Simpsons episodes after an unnamed apocalypse, the tone of Acts One and Two is reasonably identical—a little darker in Act Two, but a progression, not a shift. But in Act Three, we find ourselves in another world, where nothing is the same. The play within a play that is the third act of Mr. Burns looks completely different from the first two acts and is now sung in operatic style. The play has progressed its tone and shape completely. Streaming series give us the opportunity to watch how tone can change in a long-time form. Sometimes seasons are consciously built with radically different stories that create dramatically different tones. Fleabag has a first season that has an engine made out of a secret, and the season’s tone is shame and regret. The second season has a dramatically different engine—hope and the twinned mysteries of God and love—and its tone matches that engine. If we like, we can think of the two seasons as a play with an extremely long intermission. And intermission always makes a tonal shift easier to adjust to. But most series don’t alter their tone show to show or season to season, even though the format provides easily for it. Sometimes a stable and unchanging tone is what the creators take pride in providing and the audience depends on. Procedural investigation and cop shows are some of the long-running franchises that deliver the same tone regardless of story line or guest star. A new villain and victim every week, perhaps a different location, who’s driving the squad car in the exciting chase scenes—all of these ingredients may be different in each episode of a show, but they will still result in the same tonal footprint as all the other episodes. These shows appeal for the same reason a Big Mac or Hampton Inn motel room satisfies—regardless of where you are, you know that you’ll be getting whatever you liked the last time you got it. Donald Glover’s Atlanta is a fascinating example of a series that transforms many of its narrative elements, even creating entire episodes without a single character or story line in common with the rest of the series. But Atlanta’s

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tone—a tone like a complicated razor blade, apparently light but always deadly sharp—never wavers. Even though there is no continuity of characters or story, the creators of the show display a remarkable persistence of vision, and the “non-matching” episodes match the other episodes perfectly, even though they have nothing in common except their tone.

Doubleness and How Endings Tend to Mirror Their Beginnings The mirroring that happens at the beginning and ending of many timebound works is a structural outcropping of doubleness that hides our destination right in front of us. The instinct to return to the beginning is musical in its elegance. It connects the end to the beginning organically and has the mnemonic benefits of the familiarity/inevitability conferred by all rhyme. Sometimes there is a pattern that repeats in the beginnings and endings of the scenes as well, and this creates a scaffolding that the audience feels they can trust. Movies can exploit this kind of mirroring perfectly because they have perfect control of image and point of view. They can recreate the opening scene if they choose without having to figure out how to strike the second act set in two minutes in order to do so. This total control makes mirroring solid and unmistakable, often delightful, sometimes profound, sometimes heartbreaking. The 1954 film White Christmas, with songs by Irving Berlin, screenplay by Norman Krasna, Norman Panama, and Melvin Frank, directed by Michael Curtiz, is a perfect cinematic example of the structural power of mirroring. The first image we see in the movie is a bucolic, pristine New England landscape covered with snow. There’s a picture-perfect white church with a steeple, rolling hills, birch trees, a red barn. The camera starts to pull back, and it’s immediately clear that this scene is a painted backdrop stretched between poles on an improvised stage at the front. All around the stage is the hellscape of war—bombed out buildings, blackened trees. It’s Christmas Eve, 1944, and Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are entertaining the ragged, war-torn troops before they move up. Bing sings “White Christmas”—“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”—in front of the backdrop. The painted backdrop is the Christmas and America they are dreaming of, the one they are fighting for. Yes, yes, it’s a white dream of Christmas in a white, Christian America, sung with a song written, ironically, by a Jew, without a single

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soldier of color in the frame—but that’s unfortunately historically accurate because our troops were segregated then. The war ends. The narrative engine of the movie will concentrate on creating a tribute to Crosby and Kaye’s beloved old General to save his Vermont inn because a lack of snow and skiers is bankrupting him. When, at the end of the film, we are at the inn for the big theatrical event to honor him, Bing and Danny are performing in front of set pieces that are identical to the way the front looked at the beginning of the movie—a hell scape of war with the same bombed out buildings, the same wasteland of blackened trees—which is not just a mirror image of where the movie began but a contrast double of the bucolic Vermont snow scene on the painted backdrop that was the first image of the movie. The soldiers in the audience at the tribute to the General are contrast doubles of the way they looked at the start of the movie too—instead of ragged and war torn they are peacetime healthy and well-fed in their spotless dress uniforms. Bing and Danny begin singing “White Christmas,” and as they do, the huge doors behind the stage swing open. It has started to snow! And there it is behind them—a scene almost identical to the one we saw painted on the backdrop in the first moments of the film—white church, birch trees, red barn. This is what they were dreaming of. But this time—it’s real. And the painted war, the hell scape, is the nightmare they have fought their way home from. It’s a beautiful formal closure of a beautiful formal rhyme scheme. It puts the end in the beginning, and the beginning in the end. It puts a dream of home inside the war, and then it puts the memory of the battles that were fought for it inside that home, letting the essences of the two transfer and land. The formal satisfaction of this relationship transforms the materials of the entire work into a same/not same of surprising value and meaning, because the beginning and end become the circumference of a container that holds the entire two-hour experience, and everything it means, inside their rhyme. In the final moments of the movie, Rosemary Clooney’s character puts a present for Bing under the tree: a knight in shining armor, to let Bing know that he has returned to his place in her heart—she is acknowledging his goodness and all his virtue. We are so used to the trope of the knight in shining armor that we hardly notice: a knight in shining armor is a warrior dressed for battle. White Christmas plays every year on various streaming services during the Christmas season. But it is not a movie about Christmas. Watch it again. You’ll discover that it is an American fairytale about the reintegration of the warrior returning home from the war.

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The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a textbook example of the mirroring that happens at the beginning and ending of many plays. In the opening scene, Mag is sitting in her rocking chair, listening to the radio, and in the end, Maureen is sitting in the same chair, listening to the same radio. Same/not same. Maureen’s fate—to become the person she hated and murdered—is an ending image that is potent and inevitable and filled with significance because we have already seen it and so know how to see it. It draws the first moments of the play toward us, as if with grappling hooks, as part of a pleating that is violent and inescapable. The beginning and the ending of the play are in an exquisite, terrible juxtaposition. In a way, it is as if the entire play has both not happened and has already happened at the very start of it. Which, of course, it has. We were always looking at the ending. And the truth is that we always are. The simple fact? A play is always its ending. It’s just easier to see this in the relationship of the beginning and the end then it is in the thick middle of things. The end has to be in the beginning because we work in a timebound artform. We have no time to waste; we have to make meaning available in the time allowed.

A Play Is Made Out of Itself, Over and Over A play is fractal, it is self-similar everywhere, regardless of scale. Every surface, every aspect or moment or detail is, in some way, made of the same thing. A dense, intense, deep mirroring happens all the way up and down the line. It is like the way a single cell in your body contains your DNA, and so the entire message is there. In a pound of you. In an ounce of you. It’s all there. Or, as a fiction writer I taught at the Michener Center for Writers once said, in pure exasperation: “I hate this, plays are always about something. There is no relief, a play is always about something … and what it is about is itself.” This is what happens in timebound art, and one of the things that make it markedly different from what happens in the narrative art of novels. Novels get to be about “and then, and then and then.” The story can snake around like a lazy river. Novels can spend as many pages as they like getting from each then to then, luxuriating in the delights of language, or the frisson of

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sex, or backstory for days, or any of the ways engagement happens and keeps reengaging when the contract is so different from the theatre’s. In our contract with fiction, we say to the novel “enchant me for as long as you can, I’ll give you my attention.” And that attention is potentially endless, not only because that attention can happen for an hour on Monday, fifteen minutes on Tuesday morning, and thirty minutes Tuesday night, but because it can be replenished a thousand different ways during the day while the book is waiting patiently on the end table getting its spine squashed under the Times and a breakfast plate. This is one of the deep luxuries of fiction: the reader fills up on a book, puts it down, and then the book waits for the reader to regain her appetite for it, and fills her up again. There is no time limit for any part of the cycle. The reader can put the book down and come back tonight, tomorrow, next year. Our contract with a play or a film we see in a theatre, on the other hand, is different, because a timebound work of art has a completely different relationship with time. A play is a fuse that once lit, has no choice but to burn all the way down. A play gets one chance in one time to mean something. Like life.

Empathy and Doubleness In the theatre, we work in the empathetic artform. Things happen to characters who breathe and walk in front of the audience, and the audience shares the pain or passion or shame, borrowing these feelings, empathetically inhabiting these emotions. The power of empathy to shape who we are, and what civilization is, is enormous. We live in the least violent period in recorded history (hard to believe but apparently true), and there are those who believe that reading may have something to do with this. In eighteenth-century Europe, the novel had just been invented, and a newly literate population snapped them up. Reading about other lives made it easier for people to imagine themselves in the shoes of others, which started an epidemic of empathy that spread through the world and which contributed, according to this theory, to our comparatively less violent state. If reading about a character can make us better at understanding what another person feels, that process is magnified and multiplied when we see that character in front of us and we double ourselves with the characters we are looking at. We feel their feelings, and our feelings tell us: we are the same.

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A play, a movie, is a two-hour bath in this sameness, in this orchestrated doubleness. Empathy is what allows us to understand the intention behind an action or a phrase, and lets us know what words mean. Scientists believe language depends as much on the brain circuits that help us navigate relationships as the ones that help us conjugate verbs. This should not surprise us—the structure of and sense of language is not made just inside the rules for stringing words together. It is made inside the rules for understanding and being understood by other people. David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher whose ideas drove the Enlightenment and inspired the creation of America, said that we don’t need laws or the church to tell us what is right or wrong—our hearts will tell us. When we sit in the theatre, and everyone laughs and cries at the same moment, he believed that it proves we are showing an agreement of feeling. We laugh and cry as one body, one heart. And that heart knows what is good and what is bad. That is the only law we need. The final, or ultimate, doubling that happens in the theatre is this small miracle: every audience member who laughs and cries at the same moment, as one body, as one heart, is doubled, for an instant in time, with every other member of the audience. The dream of knowing what it feels like to be someone else sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—comes true when we watch a play. And feel a part of a congregation, a joined community. We are strangers who come to sit together, in the dark. For this magic.

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Story and Plot Romeo and Juliet. Ruined. The Godfather. The Star Wars juggernaut. Citizen Kane. The Color Purple. A Streetcar Named Desire. Oedipus. These are plays and movies with vivid and compelling stories that sweep their audience along from moment to moment, that grab them and reward their attention without interruption. These plays and movies don’t let their audience go even after they end—they linger, refusing to fade. For days after, as moments of the work flood up inside us in that almost-lived sensation, we often have to remind ourselves that they are the memories of something that has not actually happened to us. The trail of irresistible breadcrumbs that a great work leaves inside us does not disappear when it is over. After we leave the theatre, we can follow this trail easily, spending hours re-seeing the work, trying to expand our understanding of what happened to us during it. And at the end of those hours, we may have created a play or movie that may be very different from the one we saw. With any piece of timebound art, there are always two versions: the one we watch and the one that we recreate on the way home afterward, or in the shower the next day. It may take a few days after we see a work of art for the ultimate version to crystalize inside us, for all the pieces to fall into place in this new version we’ve created. It’s important to remember that this version is what matters most to us: it’s the one that we have made inside our own feeling and understanding.

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Sequence = Meaning I once tried to listen to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead on my car’s CD player. Unfortunately, my nieces had put the player on shuffle. I listened to the first three CDs of Gilead this way, completely out of sequence. For me, the novel started somewhere on say page thirty, then jumped to page fifteen, skipped to page twenty-two, forty-eight, then to page one. Track nine, track five, track one, track ten. On and on. The confusion I felt, the impossibility of making meaning, was overwhelming. I was disoriented to a disturbing degree. When the third CD ended, I gave up and put in a music CD whose sequence I knew. It started tracking out of order. I understood what had happened. I was overcome with relief. Out of its designed sequence, nothing that happened in Gilead meant anything to me. I could not even figure out who the characters were. Sequence makes meaning possible. This is so obvious a statement as to seem unnecessary to make. But it is another way of saying that it is not the story itself that controls the audience’s meaning-making but the way the story happens to them. And, because we are timebound creatures, it happens in time, in an order.

Exercise: Order Makes Meaning Take the end of a few of your scenes—if you don’t use traditional scene breaks, decide what the end of a significant beat or event is. Put these “ends” at the beginning of the scene. If you have to edit out a few tiny disconnects to make it read a little better, go ahead, but don’t do any major writing. Read it down. Doing this will feel disruptive. Crazy. Isn’t everything that leads up to the end of a scene or beat actually, well, leading up to it? Isn’t the end impossible anywhere but at the end? How can this work? Well, it doesn’t every time. But when it does, you’ll be amazed. And you’ll probably end up keeping this new order. Order determines what is a question, and what is an answer. This is an example of how the design of the way you tell your story is your story. Betrayal could have been written as a straight narrative, but the way Pinter sequenced it engaged with us differently. Our hopes would

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have run on completely different tracks if the story had happened chronologically, even though all of the “facts” of the story stayed the same. This exercise asks you to let go of the A + B = C narrative sequence of events of your work as your primary interface with them. This exercise is not a good way to write a script, but it is a good way to contemplate it with new eyes. A good way to see how deep and how indestructible its truth is.

Breadcrumbs In timebound art, sequence has a double function: to guide us forward, in context, and then to guide us backward and then forward again in a shifting but reliable landscape. Breadcrumbs go both ways. They make a path that we can follow forward, into a work, and then, when it’s over, a path we can track back to the beginning and home. The way back home is as essential to a meaningful work of timebound art as the way forward. If your breadcrumbs are blown away in a storm or eaten by birds, your audience will be in trouble. Even if they’ve shown the audience the way forward, they can get scattered by the sloppy weathers of poorly imagined characters or get trampled in that huge stupid fight in the second act that comes out of nowhere and makes no sense, and then the audience won’t be able to find their way back, they will get lost when they attempt to assemble the work in their minds while it is happening, and then of course, afterwards. We move backward and forward at almost every instant in a timebound work of art, so the ground, by necessity, shifts with each reorientation. But the breadcrumbs must remain, to show us where we’re going and where we’ve been. We do similar kinds of backward and forward seeking in a work of fiction, of course, and we do it in our lives—we are always actively seeking pattern, and to do that we must always look at the present moment in terms of and in the context of the past. But in the theatre, with its exquisite short fuse that insists on a kind of haiku-like duration, the looking back must become as forwardreaching as any forward-moving part of the experience, and it must first happen in the flighty, elusive animal known as real time as we watch the work. The past must always be not just remembered but dynamic in the present moment in order for its insights to matter.

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And so, while forward motion is necessary to our experience, what gives story its most robust quality in timebound art is that a strong story makes it possible to retrace and remember and rearrange and reconfigure it while we are watching it.

Story Is Another Word for Time Plays and films go forward in their movement but happen backward inside us because our brains prefer to work backward from effect to a reasonable cause. We constantly retrace our steps, moving forward in timebound art by constantly falling back and re-seeing where we have been and rearranging our previous assumptions and memories to match our new understandings. When we discover something at minute twenty-seven that changes our understanding of something that happened at minute twelve, we mentally race back to that moment. We adjust not just what happened at that moment, but all the understandings that clustered around and flowed out from it as well. These changes ripple through the work, like a seismic wave, catching up to minute twenty-seven. Now—with the work aligned properly—we can go forward again. And even though this falling back happens so quickly that it barely registers in time, it refreshes and invigorates us. Racing back and recalibrating and then racing forward may seem like tasks that would exhaust us if we had to perform them over and over again. Instead, they have the opposite effect. With each fall back/race forward, we have made new meaning. Each one is a perception shift of some scale or another. We have fresh insight. Since meaning and insight are primarily why we engage with timebound art, receiving/generating it gives us what we need to go forward in a work with renewed energy and focus. The danger, of course, is that doing all this racing back and forth and constantly “rewriting” a work means we risk losing our way back to the work’s present moment and our place in it. If too many of its landmarks change during one of these adjustments, we may find ourselves lost and unable to find the path of significance that will lead us through the work. The landmarks must be fixed enough to always look reasonably like the way we first saw them so that we can recognize them, but they must also be fluid in their ability to transform. This is why story and the breadcrumbs it lays down are so valuable to us. Story is cause and effect, a string of graduated pearls with each pearl clearly sized to indicate its place. This is one of the

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great beauties of story: it can be followed backward as easily as it can lead forward, because a path that is easy to follow is easy to retrace. One of the delights of any journey is that the way back looks different from the way there. The landmarks, the slant of the sunlight, every “and then and then and then” on the way home looks different than it appeared to us when we were going the opposite direction. We can see more clearly how and why our path was constructed, now that we can see it both ways. Breadcrumbs have their greatest utility in the days after the event during the time we spend re-living, recalibrating, and understanding the work we’ve seen.

How Timebound Art Organizes Itself Outside of Story But a great work does not necessarily need solid, clearly identifiable breadcrumbs to create an essential and urgent path of nextness. If you have ever tried to tell someone about Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, you will encounter a curious problem—it only takes a moment to relate the narrative events of the play, but, having told them, you realize that you have not actually described anything important about it. The path of significance you traveled when you experienced the play has a curious dissimilarity to its narrative. It isn’t that the story events, the “and then and then and then” of the play aren’t important, exactly, but removed from the whole experience of the play they are meaningless. They did not, it appears, create the path you took when you moved through the play. It seems that we followed a path made out of breadcrumbs when we didn’t actually know what the breadcrumbs were. This seems impossible. How do you follow breadcrumbs if you don’t know what the breadcrumbs are? The trust required to go on the journey of Godot, the faith required to walk map-less territory turns out to be easy to come by when you are in the moment of the play. It is much harder to describe the path when you are outside of its embrace. When we look at Long Day’s Journey (a play written only five years before Godot but with a strikingly different surface), we see a similar dissimilarity. It takes only a minute or two to relate the story of Long Day’s Journey, but almost four hours to travel the extraordinary distance of understanding and growing compassion that is the play. It is a play where nothing happens and

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everything matters, and we have very little event and narrative ground on which to stand. The element of time—a play or film’s duration and the way it happens during a quantity of it—is essential to the creation and reception of its meaning. Timebound art requires this ultimate relationship with life to blossom. It is impossible to tell what a timebound work of art is about in less time than it takes to tell—its meaning cannot be compressed and extracted. For years, if someone asked me what a play of mine was about, I would reply “about two hours.” I didn’t just mean that the play took about two hours to perform. I meant that it was about—literally—two hours and what those two hours could carry and mean. Sometimes those two hours are carried on the back of a strong narrative, with clear, secure “and thens.” And sometimes they are not. After all, we can be transported and transformed by the non-narrativebased work of Robert Wilson, Martha Clarke, and Pina Bausch, and bored to extinction by many narrative-driven ones. Sometimes story doesn’t do what we hope it will. Sometimes story drives us hard to the finish line but when we get there, the ending doesn’t really matter to us. The story has created an experience that leaves us breathless and tired because all that driving didn’t drive us to make new meaning. We leave the theatre exhausted and unsatisfied. So how do we talk about story in timebound art if, on the one hand, it seems essential, and on the other hand, sometimes it clearly is not? We do it by looking at how story elements—the “and thens” of narrative— are often used in the theatre not in their chronological, string-of-graduatedpearls state but as elements to be manipulated and placed in any order the playwright chooses for a desired effect. We will start with Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, a play whose use of time disrupts the “and then” chain of story and narrative and replaces the chronology of event in the characters’ lives with the audience’s chronology of received event.

Betrayal Betrayal is often referred to as Pinter’s “backwards play”—it begins with the final moment of an affair and then ends with its beginning. But in point of fact, the play doesn’t just move backward—we move forward in time in a third of the play’s scenes, so no real time pattern is established. This is a breathtaking strategy, because we are cut free from time, and so the story

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materials can merge and ferment in us unconstrained. By the end of the play, we are very clear what has happened to the characters and how we feel about it, but not at all clear how those feelings happened to us. If you want to tell someone about the experience of watching Betrayal, there are three ways that you can talk about it: 1. You can tell the narrative of Betrayal with no problem at all. The events are easy to re-string so that they create a consistent, coherent, chronological stream of event: “Well, Emma and Robert are getting married and Jerry declares his love for Emma right after the ceremony—he’s the best man! He talks about dirtying her in her wedding dress—it’s kind of creepy. Then they start a many years’ affair that no one knows about.” 2. If you want to share your experience of how the play happened to you, that’s easy too: “Well, it starts at the end of the affair. We don’t know how the affair started, but the play is a long flashback, so we get to see what happened in the end. I mean the beginning. We find out that the start of the affair was really ugly. It’s no wonder it didn’t last.” 3. But if someone asks you to tell them the explicit order of the scenes— if someone asks you to tell them the sequence of how the play happened to you—you will find it almost impossible to do so. Your mind has already reordered the events of the play and made them into meaning, and once ordered, once made into meaning, it is almost impossible to un-order them again. We can recreate the story, the sequence of narrative events, but not the way the story was told and received. Pinter’s design for our experience—his structure, his plot—is so exquisite that we hardly even feel the way it works on us. The invisible part of the play is in a different place than it normally is. Our feelings are out of step, somehow, with the events we have witnessed. The huge, gorgeous gap between the two experiences—the characters’ and ours—is where the ultimate power of the play resides. The journey we as audience members take is completely different from the journey the characters have already taken. We have feelings we cannot quite account for. Partially this is a feature of the way hope works. The characters have none—their hopes and fears have played out before the curtain goes up. But our forward-directed hopes carry us from moment to moment, and unlike

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most plays, where our hopes ride piggyback on the characters’, here they are only our own.

Futurity Futurity is one of the ways we talk about the momentum that happens when hope leads the audience to actively seek, to go forward into the next moment. Alfred Hitchcock’s famous “bomb hidden under the table” is the classic example of this: Four people are sitting around a table. Talking about baseball, whatever you like. Five minutes of it, very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off, blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene. And tell the audience there is a bomb under that table, and it will go off in five minutes. Well the whole emotion of the scene is totally different because you’ve given them that information, that in five minutes time that the bomb will go off.1

Now the audience is listening to that conversation about baseball carefully, desperately searching for the reason why that bomb is there. They are actively working. They are hoping. All of our feelings, all of our engagement with the scene have been transformed because our hopes have been shaped. And all because we have been given one piece of information. There is nothing more important than generating forces in the spectator’s mind that reach toward the future. Futurity is the use of information to create a hunger in the audience to hope, to fear, to need to know what will happen next. Often a work will make us hungry for something and then hold off on satisfying that hunger. Anticipatory strategies often use delay to heighten the audience’s desire for the next moment. The longer you are made to wait for something you want and the more attention you have to spend to get it, the more value it has to you. Futurity is our hunger, not the characters’. Often, the future that most interests the audience may be unknown to the characters—Oedipus is the classic example of this: we know exactly what will happen to him, but Oedipus is blind to his fate. The characters in Betrayal had no future hopes that could extend beyond the boundaries of a scene or two, and even these, we knew in advance, were no longer viable. The affair, and all the longings

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that created and sustained it is already dead from the beginning of the play. But for us? The end of the relationship was the beginning of our search. There is a difference between the audience’s futurity and the characters’ desire for the future, and while it is tempting to look only at the characters’ motives when talking about a work, if you want to know how meaning is created, knowing the difference is essential. It doesn’t matter if we see something start happily and end badly, or end badly and start happily—it’s the same thing to us. We will reorder it in our minds. And that act—the reordering that reveals the pattern—is ultimately where our truest hopes lie and why we are invested in a work’s future. “Everything in a play prepares us for the future, either by creating expectations or by creating an appropriate context; in good plays, elements do both” according to Okkie Brownstein.2

The Double Track of Time We are in the habit of thinking that narrative happens chronologically and that what is not chronological is a different species, which we call non-linear. We seem to think that a play or film that does not spool out chronologically is different from one that does. This is similar to the current odd belief that “naturalism” is the natural, default way to write a play, and that all plays that are not written in that style are divergent. But naturalism is just a style, like any other, and was once as radical as any we are capable of putting on stage. While the term “non-linear” at best could be considered a convenient shorthand for talking about works that do not happen chronologically, it means essentially nothing. All timebound works alter the flow of time one way or another. They all select some moments to share and others to repress, they all manipulate our sense of time and duration. All timebound works run a double track of time—time-on-stage/screen and time-in-life in the audience, and the two have a complex relationship that is linear only in our reception of it. The fact is that there is no such thing as a non-linear play or film, there is only the order of the way things happen in real time. Since our work takes place in the eye and heart and mind of the spectator, there is only the sequence of the way things pile up inside them. And that sequence creates the path of significance they will follow. Every work presents itself in a particular order, editing time, choosing moments to reveal and moments to withhold, and that is the way the audience

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receives it. So there is no point in calling a play or film non-linear—there is only the best order for making the audience want to know what happens next, the best way to create the audiences’ futurity, which is the hunger to know more, understand more, feel more. That is all that matters, and it is what the order of things exists chiefly to bring about. Effective order is everything. Chronological order is neither here nor there. A sequence is made of events, sensations, and discoveries. That order creates the path that the audience travels. When we consider chronology as something experienced by the audience—rather than being represented on stage—we gain the power to make the audience long for connections that they themselves will have to discover—or perhaps manufacture. This makes them very active in the creation of the experience. This is why manipulation of time is such a profoundly powerful device. But it does not mean that a work that does this is non-linear. Non-linear plays will be possible only when time-travel is possible, and the audience can put the world on shuffle, and see a play in any order they choose.

Plot and Story Are Two Different Things The separation of time from standard narrativeness, and then using it to manipulate the audience’s futurity, is using time to design the plot of a work, not its story. Betrayal is an excellent example of this. The idea of a separation, a distinction between plot and story is not new—it’s a standard, many-decades-old, postmodern concept. But it’s still a disorientating process at first to adjust to this way of talking about plot and story, because we tend to use them, in formal context, as the same. We speak of “plot points” as the way to talk about and organize our stories. We say “the plot thickens” when a story gets complicated because urgent new elements have been brought to the foreground. We say “I need a better plot” and “I need a better story” interchangeably. But if we look at how we actually use them, in everyday life, we see that they already have dramatically different footprints. We have some sense that story is a more organic creature than a plot. After all, we speak of folk tales and stories, but never folk plots—unless the folk are plotting a rebellion. We say your story is compelling, but we tend not to say that a plot is—it’s strong, or clever or smart. But as smart as a plot may

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be, we never say, “Your plot really moved me.” The ideas contained inside the word plot are just not as emotionally based as those that story carries inside it. A story can almost be found, like a new-born baby, by the side of the road whole and complete. You won’t describe a plot coming to you in a dream. A plot has to be constructed, it requires our hands on it. It is not innocent but contrived. Unlike a story, which seems to just happen, a plot is fully conscious of what it is doing (or rather, what we are doing with it). We never ask someone we’ve just met to sit down and tell us their plot. We ask for their story, that almost sacred thing, because to know someone’s story means to know who they are. The word plot is always reserved for something artificial. Story is intimate and true. So, it turns out we already think of plot and story as two completely different things. But the minute we hear plot and story in the context of a work of art—play, film, or fiction—we forget that we use them so very differently day-to-day, and instead insist on superimposing them on top of each other and declaring them the same. So here is a way of thinking about plot and story that is sourced in our implicit, instinctual understanding of them: Story is the narrative you’re telling. It’s what happens to the characters, the events, facts, or colors of the work. Plot is the design for the audience’s experience. Anything that we use to create the experience of the audience we call plot. Plot uses story—story is one of the plot’s many devices. It’s how you tell your story: backwards, forwards, in rhymed couplets, with a million laughs, filled with dread, poetry, four letter words. That’s all plot.

But when it comes to thinking of plot and story, the important thing to remember is that the received event in the audience is all that matters. As Okkie Brownstein says, “The narrative order of story materials is never as important as their affective order.”3 And Okkie goes on to say, “It is even more important to note, and less often noted, that a play’s past (i.e., our memory) is not defined by a character’s memory. Betrayal demonstrates as few plays do … a distinction based in the difference between the play’s plot (which shapes our memories) and the play’s story (which presents the characters’ memories).”4 As a rule, your story serves your plot, because your plot is the design for the overall experience. Think of the silk suit Lymon buys from Wining Boy in The Piano Lesson. Is it necessary for the story of the play? No, Lymon’s desire to find a woman and Wining Boy’s need for a few dollars has nothing

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to do with the story of the piano, of the siblings, of the struggle to claim a heritage of slavery and create something new. If Lymon hadn’t bought the suit from Wining Boy and kissed Berniece, the play wouldn’t be any different, because the kiss has no consequences. Berniece doesn’t act differently toward Lymon or her boyfriend. Lymon goes after Grace the next day as if nothing had happened. The narrative surface of the play is undisturbed—the kiss sank beneath the water without leaving a ripple. It is the plot that requires Lymon to wear the magic suit and kiss the unkissable, Madonna-like Berniece, because it helps create a world where the magic of objects is real. The audience will need to believe in magic, in order to accept a world where ghosts walk among us and ancestors can be called down to save their children. Plot’s artificiality does not make it more or less powerful or more or less important than story—plot and story do different things and can’t be compared. Plot rarely has that essential organic quality that story has, but its artificiality is not a defect. All plots, whether they feel artificial or not, are, and that is the contract that we make with all works of art—that they are made things. Now, inside that understanding, we like it when they don’t “feel” artificial or rub our noses in that, but that is what artifice is—the artificial seeming to be natural. When you look at a painting, you know that you are looking at a square of canvas with paint on it, or when you listen to music, you know that someone has composed and performed it. That doesn’t stop the magic, and just because we work in an artform that is a rhyme for life doesn’t mean that we don’t know it is not “fake.” It is fake. Thank God. In real life, so little makes sense, so little converges in redemption or forgiveness, or in retrospect inevitability. A powerful, organizing structure is what we all long for in a work of art, so that things that matter can happen to us inside its embrace. And that is what plot is, and does.

Exercise: How Your Plot Uses Story Take a single-sided copy of a script of yours. Search it for stories. They needn’t be long ones. A few lines are as telling as a full-page story. Mark them as one of these categories: a. Reveal Are they reveals that surprise other characters and/or the audience?

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b. Exposition Are they exposition that informs other characters and/or the audience?

c. Forcing Choice or Reveal Are they a story that pushes a character to make a choice? To reveal something? Both? Now, number them, and cut the stories out. Put them back in, but reverse their order, putting them back into your play or movie in this new sequence. Some of them will make no sense at all, but some of them will surprise you, and make a more dynamic meaning. Are they in a different category now? Is a story that was exposition now forcing a choice or a reveal? Order always determines what is a question and what is an answer. This exercise is about expanding our understanding of that causal relationship. Anything can be an answer, and anything can be a question. You can make anything you want matter if it answers a question the audience has been asking.

Anticlimax We have a habit of talking about anticlimax as something that happens when the event at the end of a play or movie is smaller than one that happened earlier. But anticlimax is not a matter of scale. Instead, anticlimax is typically more fundamentally structural than that—and it comes down to the relationship of story and plot. Anticlimax is when the story goes on, but the plot is over. The pointers have been revealed in their fundamental doubleness and true aspect, the primary systems have turned, a major reveal has happened and/or choice has been made. The work feels like it is over. But it isn’t over. The narrative goes on. Events continue to happen—“and then and then and then.” This means that the play or film goes on without us, outside of our hopes and anticipations. Once the systems have merged, and the central question of the work has been answered, and the setups have been paid off, the audience won’t know what to hope for or what to pay attention to. They have gotten what they have been made to want, and now they are ready to go home. If you have ever written something with what you thought was a big ending, only to have it fizzle out instead, this may be what happened.

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Your big ending may have happened outside the structure of the work your audience has constructed.

Conveniences A convenience is anything that happens just to make something else happen—it isn’t set up or anchored inside the needs or desires of the characters or earlier choices and events. It happens only because the play or film needs it to happen in order to get to the next set of events or to resolve the action. Conveniences save the day all day long in bad plays and TV shows and movies. The hero just happens to have a pair of wire cutters in her overalls, so she can cut her way to safety through that unexpected barbed wire fence! Wire cutters? Why? No reason. But if she doesn’t have wire cutters in her overalls, she’ll die in the desert. Or, the sociopath is about to attack our hero when her boss comes back to the office and chases him off even though it is midnight. Why does her boss come back to his office at midnight? No reason. But if she doesn’t come back, our hero will be killed. In both cases, our hero was saved by a random coincidence. Which is very convenient but not very compelling. While we worship the magic of random coincidence in our lives, where it seems to be proof of an unseen hand showing an interest in our fate, we dislike it when it happens in art because it does not reveal pattern or give us faith in the order of how the cosmos is structured. Inevitable things— things that we sense must happen because of the chain of events leading up to them—have meaning. Convenient things do not. The end is not in the beginning in a convenience. Conveniences are a side effect of bad storytelling and one-dimensional characters—when bad things need to happen so that the hero will take up arms or confront the school board, a cardboard villain is the horse most often hitched to that plow. Most villains are conveniences by their very nature—they exist ultimately just to force story event, to throw complication and difficult choices in the path of the hero so she can triumph and shine. Conveniences rarely create believable plot—in fact, conveniences tend to destroy it because they violate the integrity of the work in the name of expediency and betray the audience’s trust in the process. One of the great strengths of Shakespeare’s writing is that we almost always know and understand the villain’s hearts and desires more intimately than we do anybody else’s on stage. So there is never an escape route for us when we

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engage with his work—the path we walk, made out of both his plays’ story and plot, doesn’t lead us into dead ends or false escape routes with sloppy events and actions that we discount because they happen for no reason. The needs of the story in a Shakespeare play never trump the truth of his characters.

To Sum Up Story versus Plot Timebound works that happen primarily in story tend to happen more on stage and screen and less in the audience because the audience is not as engaged in creating them. The work may surprise them with a story twist, but the audience is pretty clear on the trail it is following, through what territory, to what reward. Works that are primarily narrative are easier to perform and direct and produce than ones that happen primarily in the audience, which are trickier to get right because the “getting it right” is less solid once it steps outside the clear path generated by story. Everything is trickier when you step off the well-travelled and well-lit path a story makes, every element of the experience must be constantly recalibrated. The best clocks tend to work on both the plot line and the story line, but one is easier to wind than the other. It is possible to say that the hope that is generated in the audience is part of the plot, not the story. But of course, the plot almost always needs story to give the audience something to hope for. The thing that we have to remember is not that story isn’t wonderful, but that we often get so charmed by it that we mistake it for the work itself. This is like mistaking the map for the territory. But make no mistake about story’s power. Story charms us because it is an enchantment.

And so Here We Are. We Are Ready to Talk about the Enchantment That Is Story Here’s the thing about story: it’s a drug. It chases out pain, it erases it. Story is a general narcotic, from infancy onwards—nothing better than a bedtime story to lull us to sleep. Story calms our fears. It makes order out of chaos. It creates truths that look good regardless of whether they are true or not. Story

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is a shape shifter and a magician. Story answers to no one but itself. Some stories are immortal and have been told since the beginning of recorded time—we know this, because this is the story recorded time tells us. Some people say there are only seven stories. Seven archetypal stories in infinite permutation. That’s eight billion people on earth and seven stories—one story per billion, give or take. But somehow there are always enough stories to go around. After all there is no limit to the ways we can tell those seven stories. But the uniqueness or newness of the tale was never the issue. We are in the new ways to see business, not the new story business. We are in the insight business. And, of course, the moving business. We cannot live without story. If we were to rank the value of the enchantments we use to live our lives? The ones that give us the ability to make meaning of our life would be at the very top of the list. The relationship between story and meaning-making starts at the most fundamental level, with word acquisition. In all cultures, it is much more difficult to learn a new word outside of story than as part of one. This is because meaning happens inside context, and everything is remembered better when it happens inside a structure. For children of three and four, story appears to be central to their world building, as it is the easiest way to organize experience. The utility of nursery rhymes and fairy tales and bedtime stories is deep and broad and essential. There are those who believe that story is the way children teach themselves how to think. The need for story is hardwired into us, possibly from those childhood experiences when the world came into focus inside one. Story’s ability to create equations that explain why some things happen and some things do not shields us, like a lead apron, from the radiation of our daily lives, where so little makes actual sense. No matter what we do and what it has cost us, we cannot count on the story of our lives ending any particular way at all. Accident, luck, blind fate. Sickness, wealth, bad weather, random acts of kindness, a missed opportunity. Without a coherent story to organize it, everything can seem like meaningless chaos. Walter Truett Anderson, in his book Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be, says that reality “is a story about stories, a belief about belief.”5 We try to write our own story so that it makes sense, but the meaning of our lives slips through our fingers a hundred different ways and times a day. A play or a movie or a novel with its lovingly manicured turns and welltimed events and tidy satisfying ending gives us the courage to believe that order and meaning is possible. Because we aren’t just busy little meaningmaking creatures—we are desperate ones. Desperate for meaning, good or

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bad, we don’t care. We prefer a bad something we can understand—a thing whose cause and effect sequence is clear to us, whose pattern is, in the end, obvious for all to see—over a happy something that makes no sense to us. And story is the easiest way we have to organize meaning-making and create that most desirable of all meanings: truth. Story is the way we render truth easy to see. Truth is slippery, but story is sticky. We can pick it up and hold on to it with almost no effort at all. We can spend sleepless hours trying to understand how the choices we’ve made have led us to this day and not to the life we’d hoped they would, but we never will. In a play or movie, for two hours, the very world will make sense. For two hours, we will be given the illusion that truth is easy to see. Sequence will reveal itself as pattern and pattern will reveal itself as fate. Narrative creates order out of chaos, sequence out of randomness. It links cause and effect. It shows us that things happen for a reason. Story is a form of temporary happiness. It is like buying something new. It is a bright shiny thing that stops time. But story isn’t the only way our artform has of making order out of chaos and stopping time. Sometimes, a work of timebound art has almost no story at all.

Vertical and Horizontal Some works have a one-to-one relationship between plot and story. Such highly event-driven work with vivid “and then and then and then” sequences use the order-making engine of story to move the audience through a series of moments whose mattering is closely tied to its story events. The audience is compelled to move forward moment to moment because of the thrust of the narrative’s unfolding, its twists and turns, its reveals and revelations. These works are very “horizontal” in their movement. But some works move forward “vertically” as much or more than they move forward horizontally. They progress and become important and matter to us in ways that often have little to do with event and everything to do with fullness and meaning-making, with the discoveries that happen in our growing awareness and understanding. This is the kind of forward motion that cannot be tied to “story” but to a nextness that is made out of meaning. This kind of nextness is primarily constructed inside the audience, rather than on stage. Plays like Waiting for Godot generate fierce and passionate experiences inside their audiences without ever leading them with ordinary

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breadcrumbs on a clear path of “and then and then and then.” Does this make it harder for the audience to “retrace” their steps through the experience? Yes. Does this make it harder to gather the play up and tell someone who hasn’t seen the play what it is all about, what it was like to experience it? Yes. Does it make the play make less meaning and understanding in the spectator? No. These plays are all understanding. We are habituated to using the container of story to carry us through a play and organize it both in real time and in retrospect. But we don’t have to have story to drink at the wells of discovery and understanding in a work of art. Non-narrative works are a cup of water you can drink without the cup.

Vertical versus Horizontal Some people prefer a horizontal work but will sometimes engage with a vertical one too. Some people are only interested in a vertical work and are impatient and dismissive about a horizontal one. “Soap opera!” the verticalloving theatregoers say, as they turn up their noses at Tracy Letts’s August Osage County. “Pretentious and endless!” the horizontal-loving theatregoers say, as they storm out of a seven-hour performance of Robert LePage’s The Seven Streams of the River Otta. Do most people have a preference? I don’t know. I suspect they do. As a rule, I prefer the vertical play, because more of its nextness is constructed inside me instead of on stage, and that means more of it happens inside me. It’s more of a magic act, because the path I have to follow to make meaning, running backwards and forwards during a play to renew and refresh that meaning, is sometimes laid out in the woods using breadcrumbs made of ice. They change shape moment to moment as they melt into the ground, and sometimes they vanish before my eyes. But I know I saw them, and I know they were laid out for me to follow, and once following them, I have gone somewhere I could never have gone following an established path made out of ordinary breadcrumbs. Of course, we shouldn’t think of this as a competition between vertical and horizontal works, and we can’t claim that one is better than the other. But in great works of timebound art, everything is happening all the time. If we look at Long Day’s Journey, we will see that everything that has happened to this family, and is happening, and will happen, is happening every moment. All the time. Then, look at a narrative-based play or film that proceeds by a sequence of “and then, and then, and then,” in a parade of event following event, one thing, then another, each happening in its own pocket of time.

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It is a different kind of nextness. Fractal versus serial, metaphoric versus narrative-based. The way we progress through a play is the play. The path of significance is, at its extreme edges, either a clearly marked trail by the edge of the forest (not without its dangers and surprises and rewards) or a world where each step somehow takes us to a place that is deeper and more profound and where we may end up no “distance” at all from where we began—yet in a world infinitely changed.

Exercise: Draw Two Sets Draw a metaphoric set for the play you’re working on. You may defy all the laws of stagecraft, logic, and nature in this part of the exercise. Think of your play as pure metaphor. Feel no restraint. Next, draw a naturalistic set for the same play. You’ll discover different things about your play from the two sets. You’ll make different choices about what is essential, and you’ll make foreground/background decisions. You’ll probably elevate story needs in the naturalist set, and plot qualities in the metaphoric set. But, of course, just the opposite might happen.

Even though I prefer vertical works, I am as vulnerable as the next audience member to the ease, the simple lack of friction, the elegant smooth experience of following the path of a good story. And I would be the first to admit you can’t beat story for sheer, relentless dependability. “And then and then and then” is like stringing a rope between a house and a barn in a blizzard. You just keep one hand on the rope, put one foot in front of the other, and you will get home safely. Story will reliably lead as much as 100 percent of your audience safely to the end. And you have tremendous control over the speed of the journey as well with story—you determine how many and how fast events will happen. You can move the audience as quickly or slowly as you want along that rope, using it to regulate the pace and intensity of their sense of futurity. But sometimes non-narrative works move more easily and more surely than event-driven work. Sometimes, the audience discovers that it has made its way from the barn to the house more effortlessly than in an eventdriven work. This is because they are not burdened with the progression

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of event, with the plodding along of cause and effect. Playing out the ropein-a-blizzard metaphor, the narrative audience has to keep their hand on the rope, and can’t drop it and skip to the end without the risk of losing the thread and wandering off into the snow. They have to run along the entire length of the story to get safely to its end. But with non-narrative timebound art the audience can find themselves exploding into the climax at any moment of the writer’s choosing. And, conversely, the plot doesn’t have to move the audience along at any speed or over any distance at all. The work can make meaning without travelling anywhere that feels like distance. It is a little like the phenomenon of apparent wind: the faster you go in a sail boat, the faster you can go, because the boat generates what’s known as apparent wind—the movement of air created by the boat’s own forward momentum. There are racing catamarans that can go three times as fast as the wind itself. So too, forward motion in the best of our works takes place at internal speeds and intensities that are impossible to calculate by looking at the speed of story and other stage-based elements alone. Story is a drug, a lifeline, and a safe and reliable and elegantly inevitable way to meaning. But plot is the audience’s own beating heart. Walter Truett Anderson said that “life is a matter of telling ourselves stories about life, and of savoring stories about life told by others, and of living our lives according to such stories, and of creating ever-new and more complex stories about stories—and that this story making is not just about human life, but is human life.”6

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Choice and Consequence Sometimes, when attempting to see how our artform works and discover the simplest ways to speak about it, it’s tempting to say: The drama is nothing but choice and consequence. Characters make choices. We see what happens because of them.

Looking at the drama in this way is both character and structurally based. We track the path of cause and effect. Choice is one of the most powerful ways to organize the audience’s hopes and fears and shape their path through a work. If we watch the way choice ripples through a work of timebound art, we have direct access to the gravitational forces that the experience can exert on its audiences. E. M. Forster wrote that “failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.”1 The wriggle is the space in which the drama happens—it creates the spectacle of watching characters struggle to live a life they have chosen, against the odds and against their fate. And this is what brings the audience to the theatre again and again. When we look carefully at choice and consequence, we can examine how writers can orchestrate the wriggle—the only really interesting movement in the universe. We have only to look at the moments in history and art that take our breath away and make us say, “oh, if only” for proof of choice’s organizing power. Romeo and Juliet make one bad choice after the next, each one filled with more hope and causing more sorrow than the last. Our timeless myths and stories are filled with choice—Lot’s wife makes the choice to look back. Sleeping Beauty has been warned about those spinning wheels! But makes the choice to touch one anyway. And weren’t we expelled

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from the Garden of Eden because of a choice, perhaps the most famous one in the Western world? We know that choice matters. We pay attention to it. We know that when a choice is made, things happen because of it. We use the phrase “character-driven” to describe certain plays and films, but what character-driven really means is choice-driven. Because a character makes choices because of who they are.

Why Choice Matters to the Audience 1. Choice Causes Change We’ve developed evolutionarily to pay attention to change because our lives often depend on it. We ignore what is the same in our environment because its dangers are already known. Choice alerts us to watch for a potentially dangerous change. 2. Choice Has Nextness It flows into the future of a work. A choice is like a boat in a river. Its wake lets us know where the boat is coming from, and it’s easy to see the direction the boat is heading. We follow easily in its wake. 3. We Can Participate When a choice’s costs and consequences have been made known to us, we can weigh the risks and benefits of a choice along with the characters and actively participate in it. 4. Which Means We Hope What we hope for is precious to us. Our hope means something to us, and we transfer that value and meaning to the work we are watching. When our hope is engaged in a play or film, it is alive in us. Each choice a character makes is nested in our hopes, either for it or against it. 5. Hope Is the Universal Solvent of the Theatre We don’t have to care about a character as long as we care about what she wants. As long as we hope that she gets it or doesn’t, we are paying attention and looking forward. Sometimes you may hear that your characters are not likeable, that they are not sympathetic. This may or may not be true, but the way to understand this comment is that it has nothing to do with likeability. Nobody likes Lady Macbeth, or thinks she is sympathetic character. She’s a great character. Your audience does not have to like or care about your characters or want to have

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them over for dinner. Your audience only has to care about what happens next. That is the kind of caring that matters in the theatre. So, if someone mentions the likeability/sympathetic issue (and it will most often be directed at your female characters), your task is not to make the character nice. Shakespeare does not have Lady Macbeth reveal that her father beat her savagely as a child so we will be sympathetic about her drive for power. Instead, he makes us hope and fear for her next choice. If someone tells you that your character is not likeable, it is because you have not made them know how to hope or fear for that character’s next choice. You have failed to understand that in the theatre, nextness is all. When we know what someone wants we’re for them // with them // we can track them. And that feels like caring.

Action as Character For an excellent example of how a character’s choices shape the gaze of the audience, watch Season One of Fleabag. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has extraordinary instincts for creating her characters inside event and action— inside their choices—and for orchestrating the consequences those choices create in the shape of the attention of the audience. She creates characters who act and never talk about why. No explaining, no exposition. It’s astonishing how many choices Fleabag makes per episode, how bold they are, how loudly they ring, and how they demand every atom of our attention. Only her choice to betray her best friend, Boo, is told to us in exposition. And this means that we don’t hear about who Fleabag is, we witness who she is. We see her choices/actions and make up our own reasons about why she is making them. This not only makes us active in the moment but we progress through the season participating fully in the creation of Fleabag’s character. All of Waller-Bridge’s characters are built this way. When Dad says, “Isn’t it all nice we could get together for a gang bang” at his engagement party, no one at the table says anything. But our internal voice is asking questions. “Freudian slip?” “Early onset Alzheimer’s?” “Stroke?” If this were any other comedy/drama, someone would at least say, “Dad, are you feeling okay?” But no one says anything. The moment happens, and the scene goes on. We are left, filled with questions we can’t answer. Not just about Dad, but why nothing was said. The moment is vibrating with possible answers, and we are spoon-fed none of them. It’s a gorgeous strategy. It keeps us asking questions. The downstream effect of creating character without exposition is that it keeps us from resolving,

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from reducing a choice into one thing or another. The possibilities of what a character’s choices mean invite us into the mystery. This strategy is one of the reasons why Fleabag has such great repeatability—the characters can look new to us every time we watch it because all of their outlines have not been filled in, and we can wonder about the choices they make every time. Instead of using exposition to create characters, Waller-Bridge creates another character who will attempt to assemble the consequences of what we see, a character who will worry about things like Dad’s strange remark and the family’s strange silence. Waller-Bridge uses direct address to create Fleabag’s only friend, her confidant, her witness—us. We are the character who will see and hope and fear and judge or not, forgive or not, who will attempt to understand the needs and desires of the characters in light of their choices and make meaning from them all.

The And Then, the So Then, and the What If Family stories. We all have them—those stories that families never tire of telling about that moment when something happened that shaped their fate. Usually, they fall into one of three categories: Origin Stories: how mother met father that day he helped her in the laundromat or she helped him in a hurricane. Fortunes Lost or Found Stories: how Uncle Jack sold off all his Apple stock the day before the iMac was rolled out or held onto it and became a multimillionaire. Hero Stories: how grandfather went out in a raging storm to rescue old man Tyler and his three grandchildren who were trapped in a sinking car and he drowned or he saved them all.

All these stories are stories about choice and consequence. You are sure to know a half dozen of these stories by heart.

Writing Exercise: The And Then, the So Then Write down one of your family stories, but structure it as an and then/ so then story. Every time something “happens” or a choice is made

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write and then, and when a consequence cascades out of a choice, write so then. Remember that often the consequence of a choice is another choice, which makes these choices a kind of consequence, but for the purposes of thinking about the way choice works, mark every choice an “and then,” and only write “so then” for a consequence, one that happens at the end of the cascade or along the way. Uncle Jack sold off all his Apple stock the day before the iMac was rolled out and then he moved to San Francisco where he ran out of money and then he decided to sell his vintage turntable on eBay and then he had my father take it to the Hari Krishna Center to give it to the guy who was buying it where he met my mother and then they fell in love and got married so then I was born. Your narrative needs a minimum of at least three “and thens” and one “so then”—a quite literal coding of choice and consequence. When you see the familiar events of your history organized in this template, you’ll see the way choice and consequence can create a strong and inevitable chain of events that compels your audience’s attention. If you are in a writing group or workshop, telling these family stories in group or class has these benefits: The constant requirement to punctuate the story with and then/so then asks the teller to see this familiar tale in a new way—to see its events boldfaced as a causal chain. As a group, the constant refrain of and then/so then as everyone goes around the room invites everyone to actually hear each action as a choice and each outcome as a consequence. The eBay-turntable-meet-cute-story is an origin story that makes the narrator possible. We see the choices that lead to this moment when a narrator, who is alive, tells us a story. Her presence in the room, in front of us, telling the story, makes the chain of choice and consequence feel inevitable. “Dad went to deliver the turntable, so I exist.” But—and here is where the event of choice and consequence gets its greatest power, here is where it generates its strongest gravitational pull on the audience—here we talk about the what if. What if Uncle Jack had stubbed his toe and forgot to sell his Apple stock that day so he didn’t need to sell his turntable for the money? What if he sold his stock but moved to Seattle instead of San

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Francisco? What if he sold his stock, moved to San Francisco, but when your father went to deliver the turntable, your mother was at Home Depot buying mulch? The what if hovers like a ghost around all the facts and choices of this narrative.

All narratives contain and suggest parallel worlds where none of the things that happened happened. In this one, each event that leads to the storyteller’s birth is twinned with its double: an event that does not result in her birth. With each choice we clearly see the road not taken for an instant before it vanishes. We see how fate weaves our lives with invisible threads, and how easily those threads could have created a different pattern in the tapestry. We see the phantoms of the other chains of choice and consequence. And the truth is that we delight in the nearness and power of those phantoms. It is one of the elemental reasons why story is so delicious—a story is not just about what happened but about what could have happened. At each moment, a story turns one way instead of the other, but the road not taken is still a ghost, a presence, and this, I suspect, is one reason why good stories have such tremendous repeatability. There is always room at every turn for the audience member or reader to imagine what might happen this time, and to structure their hopes accordingly.

Repeatability Repeatability is not something we talk about in the theatre much. The audience must “get it” the first time. The theatre is like life; we only get one shot. That’s why we tend to leave the repeatability conversation to the poets, because a good poem can be read over and over, and each time it will mean more as it makes itself new inside us. Repeatability is hardwired in our relationship with poetry. But timebound art is a more paradoxical artform. There is no expectation of getting everything a poem means the first time we read it, and there is nothing but that expectation in our artform. If a play doesn’t mean what it means the first time, it is a failure. So we must create work whose essence is delivered fully in the first take with no expectation or promise of a second

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one, and at the same time, create a work that will still blossom inside the spectator with each re-seeing of it. Sometimes we want to see a play or film a second or third time—and sometimes we don’t. Seeing something multiple times isn’t about not getting it, it’s about getting it and wanting to get it again. What makes some works repeatable, and others not? Setting aside the production elements that are different in each iteration thanks to a different director or actor, why do we go to another production of Oedipus? We know what will happen. We know how we felt about what happened when we saw it before. What is it that we go to feel that we have not already felt? What was it that we felt before that we wish to feel differently? Part of the answer is that some plays discharge completely the first time, and their meaning-making can’t be “meaningfully” made over again. If finding out who kills who in the second act is enough to fulfill all the audience’s desires, then there is nothing that can happen to them when they see a work a second time—and they will probably have no desire to see it again. But what is it in a narrative work like Oedipus, whose choices and consequences are already known to us, that drives us to repeat the experience of seeing it? Why do we long to have it blossom inside us again? This is where, I believe, the what if comes into its own. The what if is a structured form of hope. At each moment when the and then creates the most robust what if, we can see the alternative cascade of consequences that would have resulted from a different choice. And because these phantom consequences are not written in the text but written in us by our endless and ultimate capacity to hope, we will never grow tired of seeing a great play or movie over and over again. We will never grow tired of wanting those other consequences. This is because the what if is a way we have learned to make sense out of our losses, which often feel so random and inexplainable. As long as we can find a way to say what if, we can imagine a world where that terrible thing didn’t happen. What if has become a reflex that helps us believe that we have control over our world and our fate. By imagining a way that bad things could have been avoided—why did I take the River Road, I knew it floods this time of year; why did I let my daughter skip eighth grade, she needed more time with her age group; why didn’t I put that hose away, I knew someone might trip—we allow ourselves to live briefly in a world where tragedy has been averted. And that gives us the illusion of control. And this is why, even when we have read or seen a work multiple times, we still keep hoping that it will end differently. The what if remains a potent and powerful part of our experience no matter how well we know a work.

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My sister once told me, wistfully, that “every time I see The Merchant of Venice I want him to take the money, but he never does.” She seemed genuinely disappointed by this. Shylock first made his choice to take a pound of flesh over a pile of ducats over 400 years ago, and has been making it consistently on stages around the world ever since. But the hope and desire that was generated in my sister, and in generations of audiences by the what if that would spare Shylock so much humiliation and pain—this is part of the play’s genius. The play is able to create a longing for the what if that feels legitimate to hope for even though we know better. This is one of drama’s smartest strategies. We know Oedipus is going to murder his father and sleep with his mother, but we like seeing the moment when he could choose otherwise. Until he raises his hand and brings it down upon his father, another universe hovers around the play and inside us. Until he strikes his father down, those other consequences—the happy life he might have lived, the doomed daughter, Antigone, he would not have fathered—are possible. We would not feel the weight of the blow as keenly if we did not long for it not to fall. Of course, in the end, this longing is so sweet precisely because we know the blow is inevitable and cannot be avoided. We’re a little perverse, that way. We love the idea of fate and how indifferent it is to our longing. We like hoping, especially when we know it is hopeless hope. We are addicted to the feeling. The charged attention we focus on moments when we see, or hope for, or fear, a different set of choices, when we see into the heart of the moment of choice—that is what matters to us, and it is more important than the fact that we already know the ending of the story. Robert Zemeckis/Bob Gale’s Back to the Future uses the McFly family photograph of Marty and his sister and brother as a fantastic visual representation of the what if. Marty makes choices during his trip to the past that interrupt the chain of events that resulted in their parent’s marriage and their children’s birth. Marty has altered the and then/so then chain of choice and consequence to the point where his older siblings slowly vanish from the photo. Marty begins to disappear next, and his ultimate what if—the series of choices that result in his nonexistence—are set in motion. But when Marty repairs the break that he has made in the chain by helping his father change and become a hero—this is a comedy, and in comedy, change is possible—Marty and his siblings magically reappear in the photo and the family’s future is not only guaranteed, it is improved.

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Choice versus Reveal We have been habituated to think that a well-crafted reveal is the lynchpin of our work, but it turns out choice is the center of timebound narrative artforms. Choice is what we are truly responding to, along the way in a work and at its end. A choice will almost always create a more powerful perception shift than a reveal. A reveal, to be effective, always rewrites some or all of a work and makes it new—that’s its nature and the source of its power. But a choice is something the audience can participate in and hope and fear for in a different way than they can in a reveal. Anticipating and witnessing a choice makes us alive in the present of the work, it makes us inhabit the moment because all the choices flow into the future. It has nextness. We have no way to fully participate in reveals because in order to work, they must surprise us. There are exceptions, of course, like the final reveal in Beauty Queen, which is a reveal of astounding power that rewrites the entire play before our eyes. And what that reveal reveals ultimately is that we, the audience, have made the wrong choice in who to believe and who to hope for. Other works with reveals that rewrite them completely include The Usual Suspects, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and The Sixth Sense. Of course, reveals have forward-reaching effects too—all the reveals in Long Day’s Journey impel our forgiveness and understanding of the characters, without which we cannot move forward. Choices often happen because of reveals, and choices often cause reveals—it’s complicated, and unnecessary, to attempt to separate their causal relationship. But most of the time, concealing a secret from your audience, and then playing hide and seek with them for two hours rarely creates an experience as vital and important as watching a character making choices and grappling with their fate. When a reveal forces choice and event, that’s reveal at its best. A reveal that does not trigger a choice will not serve you as well as one that does.

Secret versus Mystery Secrets are horizontal—they exist primarily in the narrative line. They tend to be flat, because that’s what happens when you hide something—you flatten it out so that it will stay out of sight. Secrets ask questions that often require us to go on a treasure hunt into the past, and while searching the

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past for answers can be a forward seeking activity, it isn’t necessarily the best kind of one. Mysteries are vertical, and are more three-dimensional because they are allowed to flow through the circulatory system of a work. They originate, of course, in the narrative/horizontal, but they quickly expand and build out from it. They also have, as a part of their nature, profound nextness— the questions they ask have us looking everywhere. They are not so much hidden from us as waiting to be recognized and understood by us. They are coded into the workings of the play. So it’s important that we don’t confuse mysteries and secrets when talking about reveal. They have very different properties. A secret is something that someone isn’t telling someone else, on purpose, which is then revealed. A mystery, on the other hand, is bigger, broader, and instead of being something that is known and being withheld, may be something that can never be known, something that may not answer a question the audience is asking but instead asks a new one. The solution to a mystery is something that we and the characters search for and discover together. A mystery exists in the past, present, and future of a play, while secrets happen in the past. The past can be a powerful place in a drama, but for the audience, going forward in their own real time, it will not be a part of their shared experience and memory making. They haven’t been given the chance to generate their own hopes about it in the same way they do when an action happens in front of them, an action whose consequences haven’t happened yet. (In a whodunnit, of course, we naturally generate quite a bit of “I hope she didn’t strangle her baby” hope, but most plays and movies aren’t whodunnits.) So, while the reveal of a secret can shock the audience along with the characters on stage, it can never compete with a choice made in front of their eyes, and this is part of the central core of timebound art: to inhabit the moment along with the characters on stage or screen. To fear one choice, to hope for another. Some would say: to care.

Withholding And the other problem with using a secret as the engine of your work is that a final reveal often requires concealing something from your audience and then playing hide-and-seek with them for two hours. One unintended consequence of hiding something is the inadvertent breakdown in sentence structure and grammar that I see happening when writers hide things. In the

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same way that poker players reveal “tells” when they are bluffing that other players can recognize, we have equivalent tells as writers—it’s as if our control of language itself fragments and loses its integrity when we start hiding things. The way to make a mystery is to tell more, not less. After all, our instinct, when we begin to write, is to scatter breadcrumbs freely and unconsciously as we run into some new dark forest, leaving a clear trail behind us that the audience can easily follow. At a certain point, the joyous running and scattering tends to stop, and the hard work begins, but there is never a stinginess in the way the breadcrumbs are scattered throughout a good work, even in the work of our most minimal writers. In Pinter’s work, for instance, the path is always there, even if we are unaware of the nature of the breadcrumbs that make it. When we decide to hide things from our audience, it is inevitable that we will worry about which breadcrumbs to scatter and which to withhold. Withholding and worry are bad ways to write anything. Worry slows us down and makes us doubt our steps. Withholding is stingy. Selfishness is a quality that we associate more with cheap magic tricks like shell games, where the trick is that you’re being tricked. Which, unlike true magic acts that make you feel awe or delight or sometimes terror, just make you feel taken advantage of and stupid. Manipulation is not a dirty word in the theater, as that is what our audience comes for, to be manipulated into feeling and seeing things that they could not otherwise. But if your play, instead of hiding itself in plain sight where the audience can have access to it, actually hides itself, then you’ve written a shell game and not a play. Withholding is a strategy—just not a very brave one. And that is why secrets and their reveals almost never create moments that are as important to your audience as ones where characters struggle to make the choice that will do battle with their stars.

Writing Exercise: Adapt a Family Story You can adapt your own family history story into an and then/so then, but it’s so much better, starting off, if you start with someone else’s. Ask someone to tell you their favorite family story, or trade with another writer and adapt each other’s. Or, you already know your best friend’s, your grandmother’s, your boyfriend’s story. Use one of them. If you’re paying attention, you hear family stories everywhere.

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After you’ve picked the story, change one choice that a character makes. In other words—adapt the story. The choice that you change can happen anytime in the sequence— early, middle, near the end. No matter what you change you’ll be altering the stream of choice and consequence. The beauty of changing an early choice is that you cause a longer sequence of consequences, with an accelerating cascade of changes. They say that plane crashes are almost never caused by a single malfunction or operator error, but by a cascade of events. One tiny gasket, improperly manufactured in a dying factory in Olympia, Washington, fails, and then three alarms go off, and then the copilot mistakenly jettisons the fuel because she thinks they are going to crash, and then—well, you know how the rest goes. We see each moment when the inevitable crash could have been avoided. We long for the what if that will change the narrative and keep the airplane in the sky. Make sure you include at least three and then/so then links of cause and effect in your piece. You can spend as long as you like on this, but a couple of hours will probably give you more than enough time to explore how choice can organize a work of timebound art. .

A Tragedy Is Like Going Down a River In a tragedy, there must be at least one moment when we see that there is a way out. When our hero sees the light at the end of the tunnel, and everyone understands that there is a chance for happiness, if only the hero would choose it. If there is no possibility of a happy ending, if there is no choice that would rescue the hero from her terrible sacrifice, then her action is drained of some of its dramatic power. If there is no choice, the brave deeds that brave men and women do are no less brave, but it is a character’s character that determines the actions and choices she will make. Without choice there is regret or bravery, loss or triumph, redemption or ruin. But not tragedy. Only choice makes tragedy. Your hero is headed down a river. There are two forks. The fork on the right is faster, but right before the end there’s this enormous, deadly waterfall.

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As far as anyone knows, no one has ever made it down that waterfall alive. There’s no waterfall on the left fork, but it’s so shallow that your hero’s raft will run aground constantly, it could take days to get down it. The delay is unacceptable to your hero because by the time she makes it downstream, whoever she is desperate to save or battle she is desperate to win will be lost. She will be too late. So, she’s heading down the river on a raft. People are standing on the banks of the river screaming at her, begging her to take the left fork. But she can’t take the left fork. Her wife, her children, everyone she knows is screaming “take the left fork—forget about your promises to us, your filial duty, your allegiance to the Queen and your reverence for God. Forget who you think you are and save yourself.” But she can’t. We use the word character so often that we forget what it means. It means that we are who we are. And that, to a hero, is more important than life itself. We call it hubris, sometimes. Sometimes we call it will. But whatever it is, our hero cannot take the left fork. She knows that it means her almost certain death, but she feels that she has no choice. Naturally, she feels that she has no choice precisely because she does. She just can’t take it. Her character makes it impossible for her to go the way that will save her life at the cost of what she believes is her self. The hero must be able to clearly see and understand the dangers and safety that each of the two forks represent. If your character can’t see the escape routes that appear along the way, if she can’t see clearly what she is sacrificing by not choosing to escape, then neither can we. That’s why the sun has to shine in a tragedy—the fork in the river must be visible. In a good tragedy, the characters will generally have more than one chance to choose the safer course, the way to make it to safety, and if your hero is going down the river in the dark how will she see them? How will your audience see them? You have to make sure that there’s plenty of light. Light is generally understood, in this context, as a clear view of the happiness that the character could have if she abandons her duty to her gods or her sense of who she is. The audience has to know the consequences of a choice for it to matter to them, and for it to blossom dramatically. If your character has no choice, or if she cannot see the way out of the danger she is in and the rewards of doing so, when danger overtakes her, she can be brave, she can die or sacrifice herself, she may be a hero, but she is not a tragic hero. The classic hero’s tale, where everyone is saved and lives happily ever after, is not, after all, a tragedy.

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Node is a term that I use to indicate the moment of choice in a tragedy when we can see both forks in the river. If the river metaphor feels too scenic, think of a node as two doors. One door costs a piece of the hero’s self or soul to enter but leads to safety. The other upholds the hero’s sense of self but leads ever downward to ruin and death. A node must have both doors, and they must both be open, and there must be plenty of light so we can clearly see what lies beyond each threshold. There must be clear, if not uncomplicated, escape through the door that leads to safety, if only the character would choose it. If only they could change their character and become the person who could choose that door. But they can’t. No matter how much they want to. No matter how much we want them to.

Breaking Bad Season One of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad series is just about perfect as a demonstration of the two-door model of drama and a display of how will functions inside it. It is a perfect study in choice and consequence. During the early episodes, Walter always has a choice, and he always chooses to take the fork in the river with the biggest waterfall because the safe way requires a sacrifice of self that he is not willing to make. When he discovers that he doesn’t have the money to pay for his cancer treatment, an old “friend”— naturally, the friend is the betrayer who stole Walt’s work and became filthy rich from it—offers to pay for it. Walt does not have to cook meth to save his life. He chooses to cook meth because it is the only way he can retain his sense of self, his pride, his manhood. Walter does not become a dangerous, amoral man during the series—he is that man from almost the first instant we meet him. The writers of the show spoke of wanting to create an “unsympathetic” main character or anti-hero. I believe they were just following the old tragic hero pattern, creating situations where we would hope that a character who does dishonorable things would still find a way to keep his honor. For most of Season One, each choice forward shows the nodes of choice in clear detail—Door 1, safe way out of the swamp. Door 2, catastrophically dangerous path deeper into it. Naturally, Walt tortures himself over each of these choices but always, in the end, picks Door 2 even though Door 1 promises a good outcome. Eventually, he stops struggling to be good and accepts he is who he is. Occasionally, we see a choice that could allow him to climb up into the light, but for the most part, by Season Two, the choices where escape is possible no longer exist. At this point, the series becomes

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less about choice and consequence and more about balls. Walt has access to them, and he uses them. Bad things happen. The show becomes a display of escalating consequence, uncoupled from meaningful choices, until, many seasons later, Walt chooses a kind of redemption in the end.

Writing Exercise: A Five-Minute Scene about Choice Write a five-minute scene where a person makes a choice. Spend an hour or less on this.

1. There should be urgency, a time limit, a clock on the action. 2. Write one character adapted from someone you care about. 3. Write one character adapted from someone who doesn’t care about you. 4. The choice will hurt someone and help someone.

Right versus Right Traditionally, one of the ways we talk about tragedy is to say that it is the spectacle of the struggle of right against right. Antigone is a play that is always used as an example of this. Its characters are positive that their choices are the right ones. It is a play where the nodes of choice are crystal clear. The story of the play is simple: Antigone has two brothers who die fighting each other over the throne. Creon, the new king, declares that the brother who defended the city will be buried with honor, and the other brother, who attacked the city, will be left unburied, which means his soul will not be allowed to return to the gods. Antigone secretly buries this brother, even though the punishment for burying him is death. When it is discovered that he has been buried—dust scattered over his body, rituals enacted—the body is swept clear of the dust. So, Antigone buries him again. And this time she’s discovered in the act. Technically, of course, his soul has already ascended because he’s already been buried. Antigone succeeded in her task the first time—she obeyed the gods, she honored her brother, she got away with it. Why does she bury him again? I believe that Sophocles is giving Antigone and the audience another chance to look through the open door through which her happy life could

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be lived. Which is another way of saying: he is giving her another chance to act, as she must act, another chance to see what she will be sacrificing. But because she is who she is she cannot choose otherwise. We see her close the door on her happiness for what we believe is the final time. We often forget that Antigone is not the only character who makes choices in this play. Creon has it in his power to forgive Antigone and let her marry his son, Haemon. Haemon begs for her life, and once again the door opens on her happiness—we see that Antigone could be spared. We long for this possibility, because then Antigone could be true to herself and honor the gods and her brother and instead of being punished for it she might live happily ever after, after all. Creon could choose to forgive her, and let her live. But both believe that they are in the right. Both cannot be who they are not. If Antigone can stop burying her brother, or if Creon can forgive her for it, then the door opens again, and Antigone walks through it into the light. But neither character can change.

Tragedy Is a Clash of Values It feels inelegant to conflate meaning and value, and yet, for the audience member, that is exactly the case. The value of the experience is measured by its meaning. A timebound work of art creates a living container of meaning. August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson lends itself to a fascinating value discussion, as the battle between the sister and brother seems to be a battle between two kinds of value. Berniece wants to keep the piano because her father died stealing it from the man whose family owned their family as slaves, and because of its history and its carvings it is a material double for their family’s enslavement. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy the land his ancestors worked on as slaves, to grow cotton and create a future for himself. He wants to use the piano to honor his family’s past in a different way. This is a classic battle of right against right. What looks like a simple situation—he wants to sell it for money, she wants to keep it because it means something—is not that simple. Bernice’s claim on the piano feels purer, but at the same time, we want Boy Willie to have that land. We are asked to hold mutually exclusive desires. Both hopes can’t be fulfilled, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting both. This is one of drama’s more successful strategies: trapping the audience in a double bind. Because we cannot resolve our longing by deciding which outcome we want, we are compelled to keep

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watching to discover the moment when the play will help us decide which is the righter choice. It’s a relentless forward strategy.

Will A character in a tragedy is subject to tremendous tidal forces—the gravitational pull of habit and tradition and power structures, the pull of the hero’s desire, and the desires of other characters that pull against it. There is only one thing with the power to withstand all this: her will. Will is the only power we have to fight the forces that seek to destroy us. Will is how we are able make that small, enormous wriggle. Will is all we have, in the end, to challenge the gods, our fate, the injustice of man. Will is a thing without any boundaries. There is an end to strength, to beauty, to wisdom, but there is no end to will. Courage and love are also unending things, I think. But will is not a universally good thing. Mother Teresa had an astonishing amount of will, and the world still moves toward perfection an infinitesimal fraction, every day, because of her. But if Hitler or Mitch McConnell had less of it, the world would be a better place. We don’t talk about free will much anymore. We talked about it more when we believed we had less of it. Arthur Miller believed that the hero has free will and chooses her actions. She may be a saint or a sinner in the eyes of the audience, but the appeal she has for them is in her struggle, not because they agree in the rightness of her cause. Now we (well, those of us living under non-fundamentalist regimes) take free will for granted. But in the old days, we were not in charge. The oldest Western dramas, from the Greeks, come to us from a time when people were not expected to resist their passions, because a passion was irresistible— it came to us from the gods. We don’t feel that way now. Entire industries of self-help exist to assist our triumph over our passions and appetites and failings. The entire Tyrone family in Long Day’s Journey into Night should check into rehab. Blanche Dubois is a pederast and should get therapy immediately. Now we’re the gods. We’re in charge. We write plays and movies where we win, where we control our fate. This is impossible in a tragedy. In a tragedy, you can’t keep your honor and your life, your kingdom and your sanity, your power and your family’s love. You have to choose, and here the syntax seems casual but actually reveals a deeper truth: you have to choose what your

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character demands you do. Ultimately, you have no choice. Not if you are who you are. The tricky part is that it requires courage to be who you are. It is not a foregone conclusion, either on stage or in life, that you will not stumble. If you are not the hero, you will falter and fall short, and poets and playwrights will write about someone else. If you are a hero, your will is strong and you will make the choices you have to make. Or, as Sartre said: we are our choices. On stage, there is nothing more breathtaking than a display of will as it grows in the face of overwhelming obstacles. The greatness of the responding human will is what makes a tragedy so compelling. There is a unique pleasure in watching a tragedy, and it comes from the growth and visibility of will. Its blossoming thrills us. The hero always loses, in a tragedy. But her struggle remains hers. And as her will has no boundaries, so the spiritual victory that she claims is limitless too. The world, in the end, will crush her. Her resistance, her will, is all she has.

Tragedy Is Made Out of Hope We don’t think of tragedy as a hopeful artform, but if we ask ourselves which generates more hope in its audience—tragedy or comedy? The answer is immediately obvious. If a drama could be reduced to a single moment, it is the moment when a character must make a decision or a choice, and we hope they make the choice that we would make, the choice that makes us feel safer in the world—safer to be a human being. We spend most of a tragedy hoping desperately for things to go well for its characters. Hope as a structural device is our hope, not a character’s, because that’s the bigger, more important surface.

Hope as Strategy In most plays and films, the audience’s hopes piggyback on the characters’, riding on their desires and dreams the way we long for Esther to get the love she deserves in Intimate Apparel or for Blanche to find safe harbor with Mitch in Streetcar. Pairing our desires with the characters’ is a good strategy for moving an audience forward, but it is not the only way that our works

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can use hope. The audience’s hopes and the hopes of the characters do not need to align. In Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, our forward-directed hopes and the characters’ are completely out of sync because of the received order of the events of the play. We are constructing a whole world built on assumptions about love that turn out to be just that—a construction. This makes it possible for the most devastating betrayal in Betrayal to happen not to its characters, but to us—the final scene of the play betrays the heart of the audience’s hope. This nonalignment between our hopes and the characters’ is a structural device, and when employed well, it allows us to construct our own mansions of possibilities. Why does it matter to us, as writers, to value the way the audience creates their own potential outcomes for our characters? Because these imaginary future longings will compound an audience’s sense of loss when they evaporate. When the audience’s invented futures, along with the work’s actual potential futures, are lost at the moment the character or their dreams are sacrificed, they will feel double the loss. Hope is a very personal thing. I have a friend who is an emergency room doctor. She said that when a patient was brought in from a car accident or a stroke who was past help, you could always tell the happy families from the unhappy ones. The functional, loving families let their loved one go. The unhappy families always insist that the patient be placed on a ventilator, regardless of how resolutely and carefully the doctors have told them there is absolutely no hope, that the brain damage is too severe, that a chance of recovery does not exist. I thought it was guilt that made them do it. That they couldn’t stand to make that choice and wonder for the rest of their lives if they had done it because they didn’t love their mother or father or brother enough. Now I believe nothing is that simple. Now I believe that when you want things from someone, if you’ve spent year after year of your life wanting something from a parent or child that they can’t give you, that you know they can’t give you, that doesn’t mean you stop wanting it. You never stop wanting it. You never stop hoping that the day will come when you can say to each other the things you long to say and hear. This means that when they die, that day dies too. But as long as they are still alive, that day could still happen. That hope is still alive. Letting them die is the death of that hope. The dashed hope is the essence of tragedy. It is not that something bad happens to a character. It is how badly we wish it would happen otherwise. And how clearly we always persist in seeing, in the what if that lingers around

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each choice we have witnessed, that the otherwise could have so simply been achieved.

Writing Exercise: The Nodes Find three nodes of hope—places where a choice must be made—in your script, and increase the hope the audience feels. Please feel free to interpret “increase” any way you want. Some ways of doing this:

1. You can make a consequence more damaging, to increase the audience’s hope or fear about its potential harm. 2. You can make the promised happiness resulting from a choice more profound to increase the audience’s hopes for it. 3. You can increase the speed of the river. By speeding up the clock, time becomes even more of a factor, and urgency drives the characters harder and more desperately.

Tragedy, the Moral Artform There was a time when weeping in the theatre was unheard of. Emotions were considered impure, dirty things. Then came the Enlightenment. Instead of being an unseemly public display, weeping demonstrated your good qualities—if you were moved in the theatre, it was a mark of your own goodness. Terry Eagleton reminds us that “to attend ancient tragic drama was to engage in a communal process of inquiry, reflection, and feeling with respect to important civic and personal ends.” He also quotes the philosopher Martha Nussbaum: “The tragic poets were becoming the chief ethical teachers.”2 If tragedy is the moral artform, then the emotions it generates in us are the key to how we are ethically taught. We might think that we use our reason to decide moral issues, but according to David Hume, it’s not so simple. “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. Only your passion for a thing makes you want to be reasonable about it.”3 In a tragedy, we are allowed to share in the moment when the hero’s will engages. We need to experience that moment, because there is nothing in the world that shines any brighter than will. Who doesn’t dream of being strong enough to control their world? Will is the only power we have that

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can accomplish this. The will of the hero comforts us, even as it destroys her. Its light gives us hope. And the purpose of this, the reason why we need hope? According to Emily Dickinson, hope inspires the good to reveal itself. Even though there is no ultimate winning, and all our struggles end in death, we see that the wriggle that we are allotted by life, in each choice we make, is a small, glorious thing.

Characters Don’t Change in a Drama No Matter How Much They Want To, No Matter How Much We Hope They Will Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a play where no one changes, nothing happens, and everything matters. There are, of course, discoveries throughout the play that the audience and characters make both together and separately. But for events that look like events? Edmund is told—offstage—that he has tuberculosis, which everyone else already knows. That’s it. Instead, Mary and Tyrone are given the chance to change. This is the true event of the play. It is not a gun going off. It is two characters trying to be worthy and do right and falling short of that desire. Mary and Tyrone are unable to make the choices that would save themselves and the people they love, but they have the chance to make these choices, over and over, engaging our hopes each time. And what is perhaps most central to our experience as spectators of this play is that we are given the chance to make choices too. We are given chance after chance to take sides, to decide who is wrong, whose mistakes cannot be forgiven. But just when we are sure Tyrone is totally to blame— O’Neill has stacked the damning evidence against him high—something will happen that will change our mind. Mary will tell us that about his faithfulness: Mary  And in all those thirty-six years, there has never been a breath of scandal about him. I mean, with any other woman. Never since he met me. That has made me very happy, Cathleen. It has made me forgive so many other things.4

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And now we make a choice we hadn’t expected we’d make—we choose to forgive him, too. Mary and Tyrone are really only offered one real choice by this play: to continue to love each other no matter what. And this is the choice that moves, and to whatever degree possible, transforms us in the end. Change is the thing we long for in art because we long for it in our own lives. So naturally we long to be able to watch characters make the choices that cause their transformation. It’s why we are obsessed with weight loss reality TV shows—we see people transform, right before our eyes! Change is possible! They hold up their size 58 jeans in front of their size 6 bodies, there! Proof! They have changed! The longing for change explains the endless and eternal appeal of A Christmas Carol, and of the gem Groundhog Day, and why magic potions are so popular in our artform—they change people. Magic is virtually the only way that people change in timebound art—that and sometimes love. Love does make people transform in good ways and bad, and is a form of magic, in the end. That characters don’t change is no secret. Bill Hader, creator and star of Barry, quoted House creator David Shore as saying, “You don’t want your character to change—you love your character!—and the audience doesn’t really want him to change. And people don’t really change. So, the challenge of TV is to have your character take two steps forward and one and seveneighths steps back. You want to see them striving to grow.”5 Sounds a lot like the wriggle. Nobody changes. No matter how much they want to. No matter how much we want them to. That’s what sucks us in. We watch them struggling, and we always think—maybe this time? But change is not what people make. They are not vending machines. When you hear the phrase “character development,” remember that what actually develops, and what we as writers can sculpt and arrange, is not the character but the audience’s perception and understanding of that character.

In Comedy, People Change Comedy is different from drama and tragedy, and will almost never generate the same kind of hope that a tragedy will. Not in scale, not in its ability to move an audience, not in its nextness. Even the most delightfully well-built comedy will be unable to create the kind of longings in its audience that a drama or tragedy will. Often a comedy will depend on wild

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coincidence, magical interventions of forces outside our control, offstage events, and random choices—and we can’t really feel the same way we do about those things as we do about human will. And in a comedy, there is almost never a choice that matters as much as a choice does in a drama, because in a comedy, characters are allowed to change, and change is a trap door, an escape clause. In drama, there is no running away from who you are and what you have done or must do. You are the sum of your choices. In comedy you can magically become someone else who can make a different choice. But if characters can’t change, how exactly do they change in comedy? By will? No, we already know that won’t work. By accident? Sometimes, in certain comedies that ignore the laws of time, space, and probability, yes, they do. By growing up? Yes, that’s why we love coming-of-age stories when a young person becomes themself in front of our eyes, the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, or a teenager into an adult is amazing to see. Of course, that isn’t really change—it’s becoming who you are. A caterpillar doesn’t become a Learjet. And all the other times when characters change in a comedy? A character may appear before us as a different character, sometimes a character of a different gender. Shakespeare loved making characters transform this way. Just by wearing different clothes, they appear to have become someone else. They then behave like that new character—they “change.” They may take or give a magic potion. Shakespeare often used a little vial to transform his characters. A magic spell without a potion or a magical object will also do in a pinch but is just not as theatrical. Medical conditions or memory loss can also serve as change makers, and prescription medications can also effect change. They may have access to a god or sorcerer who can work a small miracle or cause some break with standard reality that can help effect the change. In other words, when a character changes in a comedy, it’s a form of magic. The Hulu series Woke is about Keef, a young Black man who doesn’t believe he has to think about racial justice much. He’s a cartoonist who is living his best life—great lawyer girlfriend, cartoon strip about to go syndicated—the world is his oyster. And then he’s slammed down to the pavement by cops who are responding to a call for a mugger who is Black. Only the fact that his white roommate walks by at this moment saves him from arrest—the cops back off immediately because a white man vouches for him.

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Does this event wake Keef? Well, yes and no. Suddenly, Keef is harassed by talking cartoon versions of everyday inanimate objects that try to show him the world as it is and insist that he get woke about it. It’s a transcendent riff on the adorable birds and lambs in Disney cartoons who help Snow White or Sleeping Beauty with mopping and dusting and doing their hair in bows and warning them about danger. These are urban descendants of all those charming woodland creatures. It’s a delightful cartoon meta-joke. Keef is nagged by talking bottles of malt beer and trashcans. He resists becoming woke. He insists that everything is fine. But he will have to wake. Would he be able to change without the magic? Well, not in a way that we would actually be able to see and participate in, and it’s delightful to actually watch the magic of change happen.

The Magic of Changing Without Changing Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, perhaps the most durable, enduring, and adapted story about change in the Western world, is filled with magic. It was a work of social justice, written to encourage Dickens’s readers to change the horrible conditions of poor children in the workhouses of London. Dickens enlists the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, Future—all forms of magic—to “change” Ebenezer Scrooge. But is Scrooge changed? Or is he instead restored by his own ghosts (his own memories and fears) back to who he truly is? The ghosts are part of him. It’s true that the quality of Scrooge’s “non-change-change” feels radically different from Antigone’s “hands-down-no-change.” But is this an actual difference, in the end? Antigone makes choices, and the play spools out from them. Scrooge makes choices, and the story spools out from them.

In all good works of timebound art, the central truth is that all the events are controlled by the characters’ character. And their “character” controls their choices, which is how we see their character. When we speak of someone who has a character problem—not in their plays but in their life—what we mean is that there is a defect in who they are—perhaps they are not brave, or loyal, or generous enough. Our lives and the choices we make are made out of who we are. Scrooge’s ghosts are made out of him as much as Creon’s anger and Antigone’s defiance is made out of

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them. Antigone and Creon remain who they are, and Scrooge becomes only who he always was. And so it turns out that Western literature’s urtext about a man changing his character is not about change at all. The Importance of Being Earnest’s charming final moments contain another example of a change without any change actually happening. John turns out to be Ernest, so no transformation has to occur—he is Ernest already. No magic required. Groundhog Day and It’s a Wonderful Life (both of which are adaptations of A Christmas Carol in many ways) are impossible without the intervention of magic. The weather (god) traps weatherman Phil in Punxsutawney for the thousands of days required for him to change himself, and an angel shows George Bailey how to see himself and his world differently. No magic, no change.

Exercise: Find Comedies Where People Change Look for comedies, for both stage and screen, where a character changes. Then, reverse engineer the change—work backward to find what makes it possible. See if a pattern develops. Next, try to find comedies where people do not change either by growing up, magic—man-made or god-made—or by an altered state of some kind brought on by potions or alcohol or alien invasion or falling in love or pretending to be someone else. Let’s say that in your search, you look at the delightful B-movie classic, Gary Marshall/Leslie Dixon’s Overboard. A rich, shallow woman played by Goldie Hawn falls overboard, has total amnesia— that’s the magic—and is tricked into believing she is the mother of four unruly boys and the wife of their father, a hardworking carpenter. She has no idea who she is, and so she can become someone else. She changes from a spoiled, mean, self-centered monster into a loving, generous, and much loved and loving mother and partner— her best self. A best self she could never have become by trying to change. And when her memory returns, she decides that she doesn’t want to be her old self, she chooses her new life, with her new family. But the truth is that she can’t change back—this is who she is now; the spell is over and characters can’t change without one.

You may find a few plays or movies that work reasonably well with a character who changes in a reasonably normal way. But there are not many. And

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they rarely please us as much as ones where the change happens inside the gravitational pull of some kind of enchantment, something that is beyond our everyday abilities and powers. And I have been thinking about why that is for a very long time. A comedy is generally a much more formal artform than other works of timebound art. It has precise turns and a clearly delineated scheme of setups and payoffs. Sometimes it may feel like a comedy’s formal demands are artificial and that its resonance is diminished by the completion of pattern. But the way and degree to which a payoff satisfies the conditions of its setup is the heart of the meaning system that is comedy. And in all works of timebound art, form is essential because it is one of the foundational ways that a work creates the conditions that contain its central truths. And the central truth about change is that it requires magic, and if an audience is going to believe in magic, it must be formally set up and established so that they can’t dismiss or undercut it. Form creates the scaffolding required by magic, and we require magic because we long for change. Because if we could change just by wanting and working hard to, then why don’t we? Over and over and over again.

But It Feels Like Someone Changes in Plays and Movies That Aren’t Comedies. Are You Sure Someone Doesn’t Change? It doesn’t matter what work of timebound art we pick as an example. The answer is the same: yes. Someone does change. We do. Or at least, we change the way we see something about ourselves and the world. And that’s why we go to the theatre.

But If People Can’t Change, How Do We Change? Well, the answer is by a perception shift, of course. But the way that it all happens is because of hope, which enables the shift, and finds and frees the

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small, precious part of us that is able to change the way we see the world. Change that often enough, powerfully enough? And a person has a chance of changing. If we think about Long Day’s Journey and watch as the endless small reveals and shifting accusations and pleas for understanding constantly destabilize our feelings about characters, we can see that this strategy’s chief goal is to make us hope—even when we know better. It is clear to us one moment that Tyrone will never change, but then something happens and we believe that he will. And so we hope and we watch carefully and we look forward—literally, we look forward to the next scene or moment when we will hope he will change. The more we hope a character can change, the more we care about the next moment. This is the definition of nextness. There is no greater forward strategy than hope. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all forward strategies are made out of hope. The audience’s hope makes them look forward. And that kind of forward is the most reliable transportation system a work can have. Make no mistake—a play or film does not create this transportation system. The audience does. The work gives them the tools, the territory, the time schedule—but the audience builds their hope inside their hearts— where it is wholly theirs and where it becomes invulnerable to logic and reason. What are the things that happen on stage in Long Day’s Journey that help an audience member generate this kind of hope? The Tyrones tell of their earlier happiness and triumphs, of love at first sight, of a little boy going to work to support his family in a dark machine shop at the age of ten, and all these help build our hope. But they all happened in the past, which means they have limited agency in the present. But what if we see the family happy, what if we actually see that they are a family who loves each other, all together, happy? O’Neill gives us one such moment—one moment only—when all four members of the family are together and happy. Because we witness it, because it happens in front of our eyes, we know their shared happiness is possible. It happens in the first five minutes of the play. We hardly know it is happening to us because it is carried inside the oldest Trojan Horse in the world—a story. It happens when Edmund tells the story about the battle at the ice pond between the pig farmer and the Standard Oil baron. And how perfect that it is a story composed of some of the systems nested most deeply in the

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heart of the play: money, class, Irish immigrants, and property. The play is announcing the things it values. As Edmund tells the story, his mother and father and brother laugh, they tease each other, they gang up on Tyrone. Their shared feeling, united against the rich Standard Oil baron, delights us. We see a family that loves each other. We long for them to have a moment like this again. Once our hope like this is generated, we will not stop hoping until the play’s end. Even the end of a play does not always stop this kind of hope. That the Tyrone Happy-Family-Moment happens during the first twentyminute period is no accident. It is the essential image that we will carry with us throughout the play, using it as a template for all the moments that follow. If the things that happen early in a play are always a kind of promise, then we have been promised this happy family. It is part of the Rosetta Stone that teaches us how to go forward in the play. This scene carves the Tyrone family’s happiness into us. And so we will look for that happy family everywhere, no matter how many times we see clearly that the Tyrone family is not happy now, and no matter how often we realize they never will be again. But this will not stop us. We will hope. We will carry the picture of the happy family with us until the end—where the play will use it to move us to a place we should have understood we were always headed for. In the final moments of the play, for the first time since the happy-familymoment the family will once again all be together. Lost deep in the past inside the embrace of drugs, Mary is surrounded by her heartbroken family. Her husband is cradling her wedding dress in his arms. The picture will call up the memory of them together at the beginning of the play, and we will contrast it with the picture we see before us now. We will double the aching sadness we see with the happiness we’ve been searching for.

Characters and Tone While characters don’t really change in a drama (if they did, there would be no drama), if there is nothing that registers as new or different to us, we stop paying attention to a character in some essential way. Part of the genius of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 is that it uses a theatrical conceit to create literal change—a male actor who played a timid colonial wife in the 1800s of Act One is now a male street hustler in present-time Act Two. That’s change you can’t help seeing. It’s exciting to double the wife with a hustler, it’s like nuclear

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fusion—we smash the wife and hustler together every time we see the hustler in Act Two, and the resulting energy achieved in the collision creates heat and light. We are forced to witness how what we thought about a character (we can’t shake the residue of the actor inhabiting different roles) ninety minutes ago is not what we think now. We have constant small, insistent perception shifts. Additionally, we should note that these perception shifts are not as active when we read the play—they only live when the audience’s memories of watching Act One create them. This is a perfect example of where and how tone is created in the live act of receiving a work. Churchill, in the end, is using a theatrical device that reveals a fundamental dramatic truth: the way we juxtapose a character at the end of a play with the way we saw them in the beginning is the central hardwired mechanism of the way our artform works. Churchill’s structural choice has hijacked and exploited the actual process of what a play is—the expansion of our perception of a character over time. Of course, we constantly double every character with themselves as they progress in every timebound work of art. And this is a primary generator of a timebound work’s tone. In Tennessee William’s Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche makes choices on page ten that we will remember and juxtapose with choices she makes on page eighteen, fifty-nine, eighty-six. This is how we chart her progress, how we measure and predict her path, how we will understand her character. We remember her rudeness to Eunice and her desperate need for a drink, and gradually these actions will make more and more sense to us, and we will replace “rude and arrogant” with “delusional and trapped.” Ultimately, we will replace that with “betrayed.” A different Blanche will begin to develop in our minds as we gradually come to understand who she is. Granted, we aren’t consciously aware that we are juxtaposing the Blanche of page eighty-six with the Blanche of page eighteen as we make our way through the play. But that is what we do when we watch virtually every play or film, and we know how to do it because we do it every day of our lives. After all, our divorce courts are filled with people saying, “I had no idea what kind of man he was when I married him.” Well, they know now. Streetcar’s tone is controlled by our evolving understanding of the reality of Blanche’s situation, which is measured out to us throughout the play. We become progressively more anxious for her as the play continues. Our anxiety is not the tone, but it is orchestrated and modulated by the tone. Our feelings keep pace and are in concert with it.

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Contrast this gradual unfolding with the tone of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined. Both plays make us fear for its characters, both plays are about damaged women at the mercy of men. But we come to know who Mama is in a completely different way. At the end of Ruined, we are forced to compare the Mama we believed she was to the Mama we now realize she has been all along. It happens in an instant. There’s an extraordinary jolt that’s created by the difference between these two Mamas when we realize that our assumptions were wrong. The ground shifts under our feet, and we realize we’ve been watching a different play than we thought we had. This “different” play has a different tone than the play we believed we had been watching—but this is not the same as a play whose tone shifts without this kind of transformation. Mama is revealed in all her strength and compassion, and actions we saw as selfish and mercenary now strike us as courageous.

Writing Exercise: One Choice, Three Points of View Write three monologues for three different characters, all telling their story of the same choice. The choice can have happened years ago, be happening now, or be about to happen. It can happen during one of the monologues, or all three—you are allowed to manipulate time any way you like. One of the characters may have made the choice, or a character we never meet may have made it. Maybe all three characters made or make the choice together. But they feel differently about it. They want something different from it. The object of the exercise is to show how one choice has different consequences—sometimes radically different ones—in the way that it impacts different characters. These consequences tend to generate new “doors” or nodes or forks in the river. These monologues can function as a small play, so after you write them, experiment by changing the order of the monologues to see how this alters the audience’s understanding and hope. Their sequence will affect the way the audience processes both choice and consequence.

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In Retrospect, Inevitable A work of timebound art begins crafting its ending the instant it begins. Just as the setup of a joke always contains all the essential materials for its punchline, the first twenty or so minutes of a timebound work will, like an overture, contain most if not all of the “musical ideas” that we will later hear played. A joke is essentially just setup and payoff, and our work is too. As obvious as it may seem to say, we need to understand that everything—not just the first twenty minutes but the entirety of the work until the end— is setup. This is the mechanism by which an ending feels retrospectively inevitable. The right ending always feels inescapable. On the way to it, we exploit our audience’s desire for pattern at all costs. This hunger for pattern runs so deeply in us that it makes us fall for false pattern easily and make assumptions we should know better than to make. The craft of the writer is in helping the audience shape these false patterns and assumptions in order to tempt the audience into following the true pattern without being aware that they are. When we do this properly, even a sad ending feels “good” because it is the right one—it feels, in retrospect, inevitable. Retrospective inevitability appeals to us on several levels. First, there is the sheer, uncomplicated release that occurs when we “get it,” the pop and pleasure of the Eureka moment’s insight that always rewards us when we don’t use A + B = C logic to arrive at a new understanding. And then there is the cascade of relief that floods through us when we say to ourselves: Oh, now I see.

We are “oh, now I see” merchants. The instant of insight is the hard currency of timebound art. We long for it, and our response to it is

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hardwired inside us. Insight gives us a new way of seeing, and, at the same instant, sparks the pleasure of knowing we had been wrong to see it any other way. We get this pleasure because these moments make us believe that if we had been just a little bit smarter, if we had paid just a little bit better attention, if we had not allowed ourselves to be distracted by a character’s joys and disappointments, we would have seen it coming. It is important for us to believe that we can understand how life happens. We need to see the pattern that is correct replacing the pattern that is made of our incorrect assumptions. This realization concentrates and sharpens our awareness, making us open and aware in new, surprising ways. We feel very alive in such moments. These patterns, which are the result of the relationship between setup and payoff, saturate a timebound work on every scale. We are most sensitive to this, of course, at the end of a work, because the truth is that the end is made out of the beginning. Great works surprise us into understanding this over and over again. Once we recognize this, we understand how deep and organic the nature of setup and payoff is. If we compare these two sets of outcomes, we can see how our expectations are satisfied when things are made out of themselves, and how they aren’t when they are not.

In Retrospect, Inevitable Outcomes If you don’t take an umbrella, it will rain. If you call a boat unsinkable, and it will sink. If you send your son out to be killed in the woods because the oracle says he’s going to kill his father, he will be raised as someone else’s son and return to kill you because he doesn’t know you are his father.

Not in Retrospect, Inevitable Outcomes If you don’t take an umbrella, and you are hit by a car.

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If you call a boat unsinkable, and then the Norovirus virus kills everyone on board. If you send your son out to be killed in the woods because the oracle says he’s going to kill his father, he survives, grows up, and moves to Troy, NY, where he will become an insurance salesman who specializes in road rage claims. In retrospect, inevitable outcomes are created inside the system of their setup. We don’t even think about why the Titanic’s story—the unsinkable ship sinking—has such a deep grip on us. We accept it as a given that this kind of matchup is deeply significant, even if it is significant in a way we can’t quite catch hold of. Is it the hubris that appeals to us, of ship makers daring to call their ship unsinkable and calling down the wrath of the gods? Maybe. Is it the cosmic coincidence of it or just the spectacle of colossal bad luck? Well, yes, that’s part of the fascination, too. But whatever it is or isn’t, the Titanic’s end is completely contained inside it. It goes from unsinkable to sinkable. The event is completely made out of itself. This has enormous appeal to us because it suggests the nature of fate—that our fate is contained inside us, not the result of outside forces, but instead, in the end, is in us from the beginning. Outcomes that are not in retrospect inevitable are not made out of themselves and so do not suggest the possibility of fate. They suggest average luck, random choices, happenstance, sloppiness. Their endings have wandered off the path, they are constructed using materials outside of themselves. Imagine one of those cooking shows where contestants are given seven things, none of which is flour or sugar or eggs, and told to make a cake. The contestant who makes something delicious using only the odd, impossible seven ingredients wins. The contestant who makes an incredible cake, but by cheating—by smuggling in some sugar—loses. When the ending of a work does the equivalent of sneaking the sugar in, it is as if it is answering a question that has not been asked, and the answer cannot surprise us in the right way or satisfy us. Making the cake with sugar means nothing if the whole point was to make a cake without it. The old saying, “Your second act problems are really your first act problems” is about this mismatch: your second act is not made out of the same materials as your first, so it can’t progress in a way that matters. How can it be inevitable when we didn’t see (in retrospect, that is) it coming? “Oh, now I see” and “I didn’t see it coming” are diametrically opposing reactions. One is insight. One is unprepared surprise.

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Cloud 9, by Caryl Churchill, is an interesting play to look at in this context. Act Two’s brilliant jump in time, place, and gender is made totally out of the deepest systems of Act One, but not out of its story. Its delights and satisfactions come from its surprising and in retrospect convergences, which shock us because of the way they’ve been prepared inside us. Additionally, we re-see Act One in a new way the entire time we are watching Act Two. We are double seeing the play. The Birdcage, Elaine May/Mike Nichols’s comedy-farce film remake of La Cage aux Folles, provides a beautiful example of how the end is made out of the beginning. The problem of the play is that a young man who wants to marry a senator’s daughter is the son of two men, one who is a famous drag queen club owner, the other who is a famous drag queen. The two men, at their son’s request, attempt to present themselves to their prospective in-laws as a respectable, heteronormative couple, but this is a farce, so this plan can’t help but go badly. When everything goes south, and the press arrives, sniffing out scandal, there is only one way for the senator to escape the club without being seen. When the senator and his wife dance out the door and down the street disguised as drag queens, we have formal closure. The problem of the play: drag queens—is the solution: drag queens. Additionally, we have this delightful formal turn: the boy’s parents pretend to be like the girl’s parents to solve a problem, and then the girl’s parents pretend to be like the boy’s parents to solve another one. It’s a fabulous rhyme scheme. What happens here is that the climax—its in retrospective inevitability—fits into a slot we didn’t know we had been constructing. The harmony of the solution matching the problem is strong, and we are deeply and completely satisfied by it. It delights us to discover that we have been looking at the end of the play from the beginning. It is the inherent nature of comedy that its convergences happen inside an especially robust setup/payoff structure. The ending happens in terms of itself, completely, as if every part of the play has offered itself up for transformation. With a drama or tragedy, the in-itselfness is made of heavier materials, and the setup/payoff mechanism is under the surface of the world, moving relentlessly to drag all things down to it, not sparkling on the surface where we can see it and take pleasure in it. In a tragedy, the wrong thing that’s going to happen has to be made out of the right thing the characters are trying to do, and that means there is pain and loss involved. A perception shift is a special kind of insight that lives, like a joke does, inside a curious, almost paradoxical zone. On the one hand, we know that

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surprise initiates insight, because if a thing is merely predictable there is no new way of seeing, which means no perception shift. And on the other hand, if the ending is completely hidden, we have no way to receive the surprise properly. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing the “familiar” revealed as both new and already known. Like a rhyme, even the predictable parts have to be surprising. And the surprising parts have to be a little predictable. We like wanting to know. And then we like finding out that we were wanting to know in the wrong way. And most importantly to our experience, after we find out how wrong we were, we like finding out that the right way was there in front of us all along.

When the audience gets to the end of a work, the end must be the only end possible. And the audience must marvel that they didn’t see it all along.

Writing Exercise: Write the Last Forty-Five Seconds of Your Movie or Play as a Sonnet The poets say that form gives us false courage, replacing larger concerns and difficulties with smaller, more manageable ones. When we are writing a play or film, the way we feel about the end is usually very strong. But its details are often not in focus yet. A sonnet is a marvelously “formal” form that keeps its writer reaching toward rhyme to shape each moment. If we write the last moments of our work as a sonnet, the artificial requirements of struggling to find just the right word to fit the scheme takes our attention away from A + B = C thinking and helps us see our work in a more expansive way. The demands of rhyme and scansion are obstacles, and overcoming an obstacle can give us the keys to escape our normal patterns and thought processes. The sonnet form can be a constraint that sets us free. As the composer Igor Stravinsky said: Great art likes chains.

Pointers During the course of a timebound work of art, many endings seem possible. Creating multiple paths leading to multiple branched outcomes is a central

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strategy for most plays and films because it is a dependable way to generate forward-directed longings in its audience. A work uses the energy of these longings—most of which it has no intention of satisfying—to keep the audience chasing, moving, wanting, paying attention. And these longings must still fire on repeated viewings, engaging the audience even when they are familiar with the work and already know the ending. How does timebound art do this? A large part is thanks to the nature of the what if. The what if lives inside hope, and hope has never obeyed the usual laws of time and space. It retains its power in the face of certain certainty, including our knowledge of the way a play or film ends. This means an ending we have seen many times still won’t feel inevitable when we are watching it again until we come, inside the experience of watching it, to its end. A play or movie guides us to its in retrospect, inevitable ending using a variety of strategies that keep our eyes open and shape our gaze. It wants to control what we see and how we see it, what we feel and how we feel it, without coming out and saying exactly what it is showing us and how it is showing it to us. Okkie Brownstein used the word pointer to talk about the things that help it do this.

The Seven Attributes of Pointers 1. Pointers have to make us think about the future. A pointer makes something matter in the future of the play, not in the present—or rather, it makes a thing matter one way in the present and another way in the future, and the way it matters in the future is the way that ultimately matters. Part of the “charge” that is fired off at the end of a timebound work is that when the pointers’ ultimate meanings are made clear, you discover that your assumed relationship with the play was incorrect. This overturning of assumption, like all “I was wrong but now I see” moments, has special value to us. Some vocabularies talk about “forwards” and might call a pointer a forward, but forwards don’t have all of a pointer’s qualities. Forwards do make you think about the future. But they have no doubleness in them. It is essential that we get the audience to look forward, but the way they look forward is as essential to that movement as the movement itself. Forwards don’t make you look forward by having you look at the right thing in the wrong way. They just make you look forward.

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2. Pointers are consistent and coherent. They don’t contradict themselves, they don’t contradict each other, they don’t contradict any of the logic and rules of the world of the work as we perceive it. Pointers can’t send us heading down a trail that turns out to be fake. The audience cannot travel on a path and find out they have gone the wrong way, not in timebound art (unless the work is about taking the wrong path, in which case, I suppose, it would ultimately be the right path), because there’s not enough time to get back on track, and their attention has been spent and wasted. The breadcrumbs the audience follows always have to be the right ones, and the trail is always the one that leads them to the right ending. It is in the audience’s assumptions that the trail appears to be going someplace else. It is in their assumptions that the breadcrumbs seem like they are leading them to someplace wonderful, when the trail is actually leading them to a place of pain, sorrow, and tears. Breadcrumbs are not pointers. They don’t lie to us, and they don’t tell us the truth. They mark the path we follow, to get to the truth. Which is always different than we had assumed it was. 3. Pointers always feel important, but our perception of how and why they are important is transformed at the end. If something doesn’t seem important, we won’t pay attention to it. But a pointer can’t seem important in the way it ultimately will turn out to be, because then there’s no surprise. So pointers have to feel important enough that we pay attention and remember them, but their doubleness makes them important for the wrong reason, in the wrong way. At the end of the work, we’ll discover the pointer’s true aspect. 4. Pointers are ineffective through exposition. We can’t achieve the utility of a pointer by explaining something. We can’t have characters say something that directly addresses the mystery or heart of our work and expect that it will function the way a pointer does. 5. Pointers point out why this night is different from all other nights. Every work of timebound art begins at a moment when something is at stake, when something is about to happen. Part of what makes a pointer so valuable to us is that it will give the audience ways to anticipate the specific event of the play without spelling it out in ways that will lessen our surprise and engagement with it.

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6. Pointers hide things in plain sight. This is a tricky negotiation of the audience’s willingness to assume, to be fooled, to take things for granted, and a work’s cunning ability to provide them with excuses to do so. A perception shift must have a very precise setup if it’s going to strike a target inside each audience member. We have to build the target, bow and arrow to exact specifications. To make this even more difficult to accomplish, unlike a joke, whose setup is rarely longer than a minute or two, a play or movie’s setup must construct itself over a two-hour time period, both drawing attention to itself so that it is available at climax and not revealing itself at the same time. It must function like a spoiler that is cloaked in a kind of semi-permeable membrane so the audience notices it but doesn’t pay the right attention to it. It is a kind of wolf in sheep’s clothing. We see a sheep. We notice that it’s a little—unsheeplike, there are things about this sheep that catch our eye, but they don’t set off the alarm bell. Overall, we go, yeah, that’s a sheep. We won’t realize it’s a wolf until it is too late. It is important to repeat that the wolf is not invisible when it is in sheep’s clothing. After all, if you don’t hear a joke’s setup, you won’t get the punchline. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is right in the center of the flock, hidden in plain sight. We just don’t grasp its true aspect and intentions until it has us in its jaws. 7. And most fundamentally and most importantly: a pointer is a lie that tells the truth. Like an oracle, they have to be wrong, but an oracle is, of course never actually wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t be oracles. But along the way, they appear wrong, to both the characters and to us. Characters tend to interpret them incorrectly or dismiss them, and we do too. Later we discover that it is only inside the characters’ and our assumptions that they seemed wrong. Murder my father and sleep with my mother? Ridiculous! I’m going to go far away from home so it can never happen.

Pointers Are Lies That Tell the Truth When all is said and done, this is the primary quality of a pointer. A pointer always lives inside an elegant doubleness. Its first self is often in what the audience thinks is false or insignificant or is perhaps just an

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amusing character trait. But during the perception shift its true self will be revealed, and these things will turn out to be true, significant, and essential. The operative phrase here is “what the audience thinks.” The lie that tells the truth almost always lives completely inside the audience, inside their assumptions and misapprehensions. A pointer always looks important, but the audience’s perception of how and why it is important is changed by the play’s end. In Beauty Queen, doesn’t Mag say, clearly, with no possibility for misinterpretation, that her daughter is mentally ill, that she has tortured her, that she has burned her hand with hot oil? Mag isn’t lying. The audience turns her statements into lies. And they realize, too late, that they were the truth. At one point in the play, when Mag and Maureen are talking about Pato, Mag says, “He won’t write at all.” It’s a vicious thing for her to say, and at the start of Act Two, we are genuinely happy to see Pato writing to Maureen. But Mag destroys the letter, making it appear that he didn’t write. It turns out that “He won’t write at all” is a lie that turns into the truth—Mag turns it into the truth when she burns his letter. A lie that tells the truth is a double because it starts as the truth that we think it is, and then is revealed as the truth it truly is. What is most pleasing about this aspect of doubleness is that, unlike other parts of a work that fall away from the center of the heat, when it comes to lies that tell the truth, doubleness grows more integrated and essential. Doubleness gets exponentially bigger and bigger as its gravitational pull grows more and more powerful. There is no limit to its ability to transform as it approaches the final convergence it is both creating and being created by. It is the cartoon hand drawing itself. A pointer’s doubleness increases in its range and power as the play goes on. At the end of The Bone Violin, the boy and the violin are so powerfully doubled that they are one. In Sam Shepard’s True West, the transformation of Austin into Lee and Lee into Austin is the heart of the central system of civilization versus wilderness. The play is a machine that generates dramatic forces that merge and then switch the identities of the two brothers. It is not just the brothers who become/are revealed to be each other, but civilization and wilderness also merge and swap identities as well. It turns out that the “lie” of civilization turns out to be the “truth” of the wilderness, and the other way around. The first pointer that tells the lie that is the truth about this transformation? Very early in the play, Lee says to Austin, “I’m not the one you have to worry about.”1 And we think—“Oh yes you are. You’re

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saying that to threaten Austin.” We don’t consider for a moment that it’s the truth. But it turns out that Austin is the wild, violent one. He is the one to worry about, not Lee. Lee’s desire is to be a screenwriter, to eat with a fork and knife off china plates, to leave the desert and the wilderness behind him. So Lee isn’t the one to worry about—he was telling the truth. It was something we thought was a lie. Look at the difference between “I’m not the one you have to worry about” and the equivalent line with no doubleness, no lie that tells the truth: “I’m dangerous, you’d better watch out for me,” which is what we assume he’s saying. That line would have been said by a different character, one who was just threatening Austin. The line Shepard has Lee say looks like a threat, but it’s not. Instead, it tells the longings of his character right up front— that Lee longs to be known as the good brother, the one who no one has to worry about. And also, at the same time, it identifies the real threat—Austin. If Lee isn’t “the one” to worry about, it suggests that someone else is. That someone, of course, is Austin. The reason why great characters are so compelling and vivid is that they function like this. They can speak their deepest needs and desires, which the audience (and other characters) misinterpret at first, and then realize their mistake later. Lee’s character doesn’t change—he longs to be the good brother from the instant he walks in the door. Only our perception of him changes. What’s so brilliant about Shepard’s line is that it reinforces our false idea about Lee’s character, while at the same time laying the ground for our future reception of his true self. Who is making the lie that tells the truth? We are.

Pointers and Perception Shifts Every work creates its pointers in a way that is particular to it—they are made out of each work’s unique DNA. As a rule, they tend to live in the primary systems of the work, which are its organizing truths. In Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, the important pointers are made inside the ruined system: the ruin of these women, the country, and human decency. Primarily, they will point toward the play’s central truth—that Mama herself is ruined. At the beginning of the play, Christian brings Mama two girls for her brothel. But one of them, Sophie, is ruined—she has been savagely raped and mutilated in a way that means she cannot service men at Mama’s brothel.

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Christian asks Mama to keep her anyway. Mama says, “I’m sorry but I can’t, I don’t have room for another broken girl.”2 We assume she is speaking about her other girls, but Mama is referring to herself at this moment. She is doubling herself with Sophie, we just don’t realize it. A little later, Mama gives Sophie some liquor, telling her, “Here, it’ll help with the pain down there. I know it hurts.”3 This kindness surprises us, because she’s presented herself as a hard and pragmatic survivor—we think she is like Rick in Casablanca: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”4 What’s great about this sudden, unexpected kindness is that its edges don’t mesh—it’s an action at odds with Mama as she has presented herself, so it sticks out, and it sticks with us. Of course, we never imagine that she actually does know it hurts, we never dream that she is also ruined. We interpret it one way, but the truth of it is right in front of us. At climax, the reason for all of Mama’s kindness and special attention toward Sophie during the play becomes clear. We see Mama and the entire play differently. We say to ourselves, “Oh, now I see.” The fact that Mama is ruined makes everything that didn’t quite make sense about her fall into line. The climax will answer questions that we were unaware we were asking. It’s important to remember, especially when collaborators—or potential ones—ask you about a character’s development, that there is no such thing (except in coming-of-age narratives, of course). What develops in almost all our works is not the character but the audience’s perception or understanding of the character. It’s also important to remember that meaning is relationship—“this means that” is what we really mean when we talk about meaning in the most elemental terms. Meaning is always two things and how we make the transit between them. How we resolve their relationship, how we organize and remember it, and where we position ourselves in reference to it. That’s what meaning is. Fairly late in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, Hazel asks Rose if she made a number one or number two in their downstairs toilet. She asks her several times, and she explains, finally, why it is so important that she know: the downstairs toilet can’t handle a number two, it will flood the house, and she’ll have to clean up the unfortunate byproducts. Rose insists that she did not make a number two. The extraordinary power of this series of questions and answers— which is weirdly odd and disturbing—is that it is a pointer of breathtaking doubleness. Not only is Rose lying, as we will find out moments before the end of the play, when the toilet overflows into the kitchen, but this

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is no simple setup/payoff. It will feel, only for a second, like an ordinary household plumbing disaster that was predicted by constant, embarrassing questions. But as Hazel’s husband Robin puts on protective gear—yellow gloves— and begins to clean the overflowing sewage up, we will understand, inside the very strong and very large perception shift that is occurring inside us, that we are watching a double, a visual metaphor of the clean-up of the nuclear reactor meltdown that has happened a few miles away. This is a moment of breathtaking doubleness. We are seeing the present, ordinary moment of an overflowing toilet and the nuclear disaster at the same time. Rose and Robin have made the decision to go to the reactor and help clean it up, even though the radiation will kill everyone who volunteers to do this. This is the moment when we have the play’s primary perception shift—suddenly we understand why there has been so much attention to the human body, to Rose’s injuries, and to aging—every reference to it has been a pointer, preparing us for the sacrifice that Rose and Robin intend to make because their age means they have less life to lose than younger people. Suddenly we understand that the children of the title are not Hazel and Robin’s but the children of the world, and each mention of their literal children has been a pointer to understanding this greater responsibility. It’s a remarkable perception shift, and its pointers live perfectly and consistently in both the ordinary and the metaphoric world of the play— as all true pointers do. In the day-to-day aspect of the play we think we are watching about three old friends and a long-ago affair, “the children” appear to be one thing. In the play where a husband is leaving his wife to die cleaning up a radioactive reactor accident, “the children” are something else entirely. They don’t change—only our understanding of them does. All this is to say that meaning-making is a dramatic event. It is a thing in motion, in relationship, in need, in tension. When we see a pointer’s true meaning—its true relationship with the world of the work, its true relationship with you—that’s a satisfying perception shift.

Pointers versus Systems Systems and pointers share territory in a work, but should not be confused with each other. Systems aren’t lies, so they can’t be lies that tell the truth. Instead, they are the world of the work. And a pointer is active and dynamic in a way that a system never is—pointers seem to exist in more than one

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dimension, because they have to be able to shapeshift and merge. A system is a kind of meta-breadcrumb. It is on the ground of a work, it is recognizable, reliable, and obvious. A pointer lives inside the audience, ultimately, so it’s less solid—it has a bespoke quality, an ability to be custom made for every individual that makes up that audience. And a pointer’s “force” radiates out, broadcasting its double signal, while a system pulls in, casting a gravitational net that sucks in same/not sames (so it’s magnetic, in a sense) in order to collect as much mass as it can. Yes, systems are made of doubleness, but a doubleness that defines and claims rather than turns and points forward. A system “is”, a pointer “does.”

How Pointers Announce Themselves We generate pointers without being fully aware that we are creating them, so we often have trouble recognizing them as the grammar of a perception shift. And they are often anomalous signal that doesn’t quite match the landscape around them. So, before a work is finished, we can end up erasing pointers before we have a chance to see how they actually function. They are also at risk later in the process when they become vulnerable to collaborators who don’t understand them and want the work to make “sense.” This can remove essential parts of the trail we are laying out for our audience. The good news is that a pointer wants to be recognized, it wants to look special, it wants to draw a certain attention to itself. If it doesn’t, the audience won’t notice it and remember it in the way the work needs it in order to be available at the convergence. It’s true that we tend not to remember things we don’t understand or that don’t have meaning for us, but a pointer’s doubleness means we will understand it, just in the wrong way, and this understanding will make it stick in our memory so that it is available to us when the work activates it. A timebound work of art makes its pointers sticky. Stickiness is an essential aspect of our artform because the audience can’t carry everything with them moment to moment, and this means that things that are not sticky fall away. Some writers have a gift for sounding a note once and somehow making it sink its hooks deep into its audience’s awareness. Others have to use or say something three or four times before it sticks. But a good pointer is like a burr we pick up when we walk through the woods—we don’t really notice it, and it is almost impossible to brush it off. It sticks till the end so that it is available to trigger the perception shift.

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Writers use a variety of strategies to make things sticky in a timebound work. Things that shape forward-directed desires, in general, have to have an overall stickiness. The easiest way to make something sticky is to make it feel important to the audience, but pointers can’t feel important in a straightforward way. Outside of the power of surprise or violence or anticipation to lodge something in the audience’s mind, most of these strategies exploit the ways that we are accustomed to sorting and processing events in terms of their significance. We can look at A Long Day’s Journey for examples of pointers. 1. First and last moments register as important The first moments of a work are highly significant—both the first lines and the first characters we see. An audience will always pay special attention to beginnings and endings. In Long Day’s Journey, the play begins as Mary and Tyrone enter. Tyrone  You’re a fine armful now, Mary, with those twenty pounds you’ve gained. Mary (smiles affectionately)  I’ve gotten too fat, you mean, dear. I really ought to reduce.5

These lines—which seem perfectly ordinary—are enormously significant. What Tyrone is really saying is, “How wonderful that you have gained weight now that you’ve recovered from your addiction.” And what Mary is really saying is, “I need to hide the fact that I’ve started taking drugs again, and so I don’t have an appetite and I’ll lose weight, but I want you to think I’m not eating on purpose.” Visual signal also produces strong pointers. The play begins when Mary and Tyrone enter together, his arm around her. Their sons join them—the family is together. The final moments find all four together again, but this time Tyrone is holding the wedding gown, not his wife, in his arms. Same/not same. The final moment mirrors the first moment—but changed by the devastating accumulation of the day. 2. Volume and scale The very long often registers as important. When something is very big, either in intensity or length, we pay special attention to it. The first story of length we hear is about the hogs in the Standard Oil baron’s ice pond. It’s the longest beat so far and the only story that is told to the whole family. It is also important because it is about class,

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about land, about money—we are deep in some of the central systems of the play. 3. Anomalous signal It’s reasonably safe to say that, in general, a pointer draws attention to itself with some degree of anomalous signal—there is something about it that is in some way a non-match to the world around it, or something that doesn’t quite resolve or come into 100 percent unambiguous focus. Any incongruity, anything out of sequence or pattern, makes us sit up and pay attention because it fires off our survival instinct. It needn’t be a large break with the continuity of tone, meaning, pace, style, or story materials to catch our attention and register as something significant. We are busy little meaning-making creatures, so we will be looking for clues that will let us discover where we are going and what it will mean. In Long Day’s Journey, there is virtually nothing that qualifies as anomalous in this way. There is Jamie’s Fat Violet story, the part of the play that is most often cut in performance because it doesn’t seem important. But it isn’t anomalous signal that will signal something important to us. 4. Repetition Repetition is a strong indicator of importance, as we always privilege anything that is repeated. Repetition sets off the alarm bell that tells us that we should pay attention and remember it. In Long Day’s Journey, our attention is repeatedly drawn to Mary’s hair and hands. They are a clock that is an indication of Mary’s increasing drug consumption throughout the day. In retrospect, we realize they were important signposts on the journey into night we have taken. Of course, in a landscape that is filled with doubling and repetition, the singular will stand out in bold relief. The happy moment in Act One, when the family laughs together at the story of the ice pond, is never repeated. Its ability to create our forward (and thwarted) longing for another moment like it is an important part of the play’s strategy. 5. Rhyming or pairing or mirroring So many things mean more than one thing and have more than one use in a timebound work of art. This is not just a matter of the economy that is necessary because of the time constraints of the

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artform—it is also one of the central ways in which a work tells us what matters. We are constantly asked to double Tyrone with Jamie and Mary with Edmund. Whiskey is used by the entire family to try to avoid Edmund’s bad news, it is locked up in a display of Tyrone’s cheapness and used by him to assert his power over his sons, it’s used by Mary to bribe her household help, and Jamie waters it down in a display of bleak rebellion. It’s used during the entire play to make James Tyrone’s relationship with money—which is the prime activator of the drama—take visual focus at all times. 6. Dense poetical image or language or rhythm This is another way that many works signal their pointers. Of course, if the entire work is hyper-poetic, this won’t register. But a lyrical outcropping in a non-lyrical piece will catch our ear. We have Mary’s stories, which are often extraordinarily poetic, and then of course we have Edmund’s fog people speech, and his story about the sea. Imageheavy heightened speech asks for a special kind of attention. And rhythm is also something we are sensitive to. Writers often have an instinct to put a pause right after or before an important moment, because it is our nature to respond to a break in rhythm. We also register insistence of rhythm. 7. System introduced late Most works introduce their organizing systems at the top, and then fill up and expand and progress them. A new system introduced late in a work alerts us to something especially worthy of our attention. The wedding gown and its twin in hope, the note to Tyrone from Edwin Booth, come late to the party. The story of Mary’s wedding gown is introduced into a world where virtually nothing new has been referenced for almost two hours. We know it’s important. 8. To sum up These are all ways of saying the same thing: a pointer always says pay attention, there is something special about me. A pointer points us forward, makes us look at the right thing in the wrong way, focuses our gaze, expands our ability to feel and remember and misremember and remember again, helps claim our sympathies, organizes our responses in real time, trains us to long for outcomes, and charts a path through unknown and unknowable emotional landscapes. And all of this, so that we can make meaning out of what is happening before us, on stage.

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The Power of Surprise When It Isn’t Surprising Surprise endings only really work when they aren’t really surprising. There is surprise, of course—the surprise that happens when we realize we’ve been looking at the right thing in the wrong way—but that surprise is much deeper than any surprise that “happens” on stage or screen, because it happens inside us. Pointers are how that realization is planted and triggered. Jane Champion’s The Power of the Dog tells us constantly what it is about and how it is about it, and a second viewing will make us marvel that we didn’t notice it before. The film scatters its breadcrumbs purposefully and uses its few pointers with precision. The first pointer happens before the film even begins, in a voiceover during the credit sequence. A boy says, “When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?”6 What’s wonderful about this pointer—and how its exquisite doubleness is created—is that it is not just setting up the story of a boy who saves his mother. That would satisfy us, of course, because the boy saves her in the last way we might have expected—but its true doubleness lives in how these lines launch the plot. The film has announced itself in the phrase “what kind of man would I be.” What we are really being pointed to is that this is a film about the territory of what it means to be a man. Naturally, that territory will deceive us. But one of the curious things about this first pointer is that most people don’t remember hearing it. I don’t mean that they see it, forget they’ve seen it, and then later, when the work of art activates it, remember and understand it. I mean they hear the way people saw the gorilla on the basketball court— it doesn’t really register at all. I think that I heard it and processed it as story material—a boy’s father died, his mother needed protecting, he asserts his desire to do so—processed it as flat fact, and then basically forgot about it: boy, dead father, mother, check. It was information, and I plowed it into story, and moved on. Nothing special here. The first few moments of a work of timebound art are a curious animal. On the one hand, we treasure first moments and privilege them. There are many devices for making those first moments imprint on an audience. The audience is alert, seeking a frame, they are highly sensitive to anything that looks like context, they will grab hold of any clue as to what the piece is

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about and how it is about it. But we cannot count on the audience fully receiving a pointer in the first seconds of a work. Without context, there is nothing for a pointer to point to. The Power of the Dog’s opening moments work well as story. Only on a second viewing do we realize that the film was declaring itself in its first beats. We spend most of the film watching the acts of brutal, super-masculine rancher Phil Burbank—this seems to be the kind of man that the world of the film values. Peter, the boy who spoke the voice over at the start of the film, is first seen making paper flowers and is ridiculed by Phil and his men and called a Nancy. He is only a boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and it is brutal harassment. But Peter is a killer. He kills a rabbit and dissects it. He’s training to be a surgeon so we discount it, but his mother does not. She screams “No more killing in the house”—this has happened before. This is the second pointer. He kills another rabbit outside—it’s a mercy killing, done because the rabbit has a broken leg. Peter is tender with it before he snaps its neck. Again, we discount the ease with which he takes a life—this is the third pointer. But the pointer that truly prepares us for Peter’s calculated, coldhearted act of murder is when Peter tells Phil that his father worried that he wasn’t kind enough, that he worried he was too strong. Phil says, “You? Too strong? He got that part wrong.” And we agree with Phil. But at the end of the film, we will understand that Peter’s father was right, and we and Phil are wrong. The Power of the Dog spends almost its entire length showing us how weak Peter is—or at least, is perceived to be—and only undercuts it with two rabbits and two short events, which we discount. When we realize that Peter has murdered Phil, we will remember the rabbits and his father saying he was too strong, and these pointers will transform the “surprise” of the worm turning and biting its tormentor—and, more importantly, its mother’s tormentor—into the inevitable outcome we should have seen coming all along.

How to Write Pointers on Purpose You can’t. I’m sorry. Well, maybe you can? But I’ve never seen anyone who could. For the most part, it’s impossible to write them on purpose. Still, it’s not a problem. We can learn to recognize them once we have completed the first draft.

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Foreshadowing and Misdirection At this point in the conversation, inevitably someone will say, “Oh, a pointer is like foreshadowing.” This could not be further from the truth. Foreshadowing is for bad mystery novels. It is not for timebound art. Yes, our work does things that generate forces in the audience that reach for the future, that need the future, but not the kind of future that foreshadowing foretells. There is no lie that tells the truth in foreshadowing. There is only a sign that says, “Watch out for the cliff, if a character falls off, they’ll die.” So when a character falls off and dies? Predictable. No surprise. Without surprise there is no insight. Surprise and insight only happen when the cliff is always there, but we didn’t see it correctly and identify it as dangerous, or we saw it and assumed it was too far away to matter, or we believed it when the characters said they were going to grow wings and fly over it. So when a character confesses that chances are they will not be able to grow wings, we realize that the cliff is huge, steep, inescapable, lethal—and we don’t say, “Oh yeah, I knew that cliff was going to end up biting them in the ass.” We say, “Oh, why didn’t I see this before.” There must be mystery, there can be confusion. But there is a difference between productive and unproductive confusion. Productive confusion deepens the mystery, and at the end of the work, we see clearly what we should have understood all along. Unproductive confusion just derails and stalls our understanding and is just discarded when the truth appears at the end. Misdirection falls in the unproductive confusion category. It takes the audience somewhere away from the central heart of a work to hide the destination from them. Misdirection is a flat lie, not a lie that tells the truth. This is the opposite of a pointer, which tells the truth in a way that looks like a lie. It takes the audience somewhere that looks like somewhere else but isn’t. Pointers do not and cannot misdirect the audience. The constraints on timebound art make that a trap, a waste. Misdirection and red herrings are always a bad strategy in our work, because they unmake meaning, and that’s the opposite of what all our strategies are ultimately designed to do. Misdirection and red herrings are noise. They use up time to no purpose, and you don’t have a moment to waste. You have sixty-eight minutes or ninety-three minutes or the old-fashioned two hours. If your audience looks in the wrong place too long, they will get lost. Our work is always about

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noise to signal ratio. In a novel, misdirection is used to distract a reader from the truth, to withhold it from them. We don’t ever want the audience to look away from the truth. We want them to look at it all the time, just not know it. If The Beauty Queen of Leenane were put on trial for tricking the audience, the play could say, quite honestly: Your honor, I never lied to the audience. Mag told them flat out that Maureen was crazy and was torturing her. Is it my fault that they refused to believe Mag? That they sided with Maureen? (Well, okay, it is, but that’s not the point. I did want them to side with her, but I never lied to them!) Of course Maureen is a monster and I never indicated otherwise, except for that monologue about how mean the other cleaners in England were to her. But even monsters have feelings, right? Even monsters feel pain and hurt. I always told the truth, your honor.

And this is true because a good play always tells the truth. It has to, because in order for a work to surprise us and generate the insight we come to the theatre for, it has to give us something that feels new. And it has to do this even if we have seen the work multiple times. When we see a great timebound work over and over again, it still “happens” to us, it still feels “new.” To understand how this happens, we must enlarge our understanding of what “new” means. What makes something feel new to us is not how recently it occurred or how different it is from what has come before it. Why would something have value to us just because we haven’t seen it before? There is only one thing that has the kind of durability, and repeatability, and power, that feels new every time we encounter it: the truth.

The Atomic Throw Is an Uncertain Kitchen Sometimes a pointer will be almost a kind of hole we can’t fill, a piece of the puzzle we can’t be quite sure is even missing, a gap in the logic of a story that sets up an event we should have seen coming, but, of course, didn’t until it was unfolding in front of us. In Pinter’s Betrayal, we saw that Emma remembers that Charlotte was thrown up in the air in Jerry’s kitchen, and Jerry remembers that it happened in Emma’s. And this is the emblematic uncertain kitchen that gives us a template for the function of designed instability in our artform. We hear that there are two different kitchens where Charlotte was thrown up in the

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air at the same time in two memories. That’s an impossibility, and so it has a meaning we can’t resolve. How can it be both? It disturbs us, and it sticks in our memories with a particular itch because it is a question that makes us search for its answer. We never find out which kitchen, but its utility is clear—to make us stay uncertain about it, to keep it in play, to keep us searching. An uncertain kitchen is something that does not resolve and still manages to point us forward inside doubleness. Most pointers are solid in our (incorrect) assumption of what they are—they seem one thing, and then it turns out that we were wrong and they are something else. But a pointer forged in the uncertain kitchen remains out of focus and is more than one thing from the beginning. An uncertain kitchen keeps us busy trying to understand its rules so we can figure out what might happen. But we can’t. It’s like Schrodinger’s cat. As long as the box is closed, we have no way of knowing if the cat is alive or dead, so, until the box is opened, it is both alive and dead—it has the qualities, in our imagination, of both. Anything in the uncertain kitchen shares these qualities. And that means that the usual rules of what can happen no longer apply. When we are not sure of what a thing is or can be, it can be any thing. The moments that set up the atomic throw in Tyler Nilson/Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon share this aspect and function like Schrodinger’s cat. The atomic throw has been placed inside the black box that is the movie. We see the throw in the first few minutes of the film when Zak, a highly functional young man with Down syndrome who lives in a nursing home, plays an old video tape of the Salt Water Redneck’s wrestling show. The Salt Water Redneck was once a star in Championship Wrestling, a world made of choreographed uncertainty—it’s fake and everyone knows it’s fake, but everyone pretends that it’s real. Zak’s roommate Carl complains that he has been made to watch the atomic throw a hundred times. We are asked to dismiss and discount the throw by Carl’s attitude about it at the same time that we are asked to value it because of the way Zak feels about it— two mutually incompatible ways of seeing it. The throw is introduced inside uncertainty. Zak has a dream: to break out of the nursing home, find the Salt Water Redneck, and learn the atomic throw. This is the clock of the film, and once it is set in motion, it drives us till the end. Carl helps Zak escape. Zak’s caregiver, Eleanor, asks how Zak bent the bars in the window, and Carl shrugs and says, “You know him, you know how strong he is.” Eleanor

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doesn’t say yes or no. But we saw who bent the bars, and it was Carl, not Zak. We assume Carl said that to shift the blame away from himself, not because Zak is strong. Later in the film, Zak pulls Tyler, the man who has befriended him, up with one hand out of the river. Tyler says, “Wow, you are so strong, I know a lot of big men who couldn’t do that.” But it doesn’t look that out of the ordinary. We assume that Tyler is just building up Zack’s self-esteem. When they get to the Salt Water Redneck’s house, the man who comes to the door is clearly the Salt Water Redneck. But he says, “I’m not the Salt Water Redneck, don’t bother me, go away.” We’re just as disappointed as Zak is. So when a few minutes later the Redneck chases them down in his tricked out convertible, war paint on, and has them all climb in, we’re thrilled. The Salt Water Redneck has gone from uncertain to certain to uncertain, but now he’s certain for sure. Zak asks to learn the atomic throw. The Redneck says it’s impossible, it’s fake, it isn’t real. “No,” says Zak, “I’ve seen you do it a hundred times.” “Sorry, kid,” the Redneck says. “It’s a trick. No one is that strong. It’s done with wires.” The atomic throw almost become real but now has retreated into uncertainty. The Redneck teaches Zak some wrestling moves and sets up a match for him. He sets it up, unfortunately, with a failure of a wrestler, a snarling dog of a man. During the match, he hurts Zak over and over and will not stop. Zak is lost, he doesn’t understand what is happening. Finally, he grabs the dog man and lifts him up over his head. Everyone, including the Redneck, watches in utter, jaw–dropping amazement, transfixed by the miracle. Zak, half the dog man’s size, throws him up in the air and out of the ring, exactly as he had seen the Redneck do on his video. The atomic throw is a miracle, and it’s real. Miracles live, by definition, in uncertain kitchens. If they can be explained and proven, if they make sense? They’re not miracles. But in a timebound work of art, when they happen, they still have to satisfy us in an in retrospect, inevitable way. So how does the miracle work? Why do we believe that Zak could do something that is impossible to do? We never see Zak perform a single quantifiable act of strength—and this is essential. Zak’s actual, observable superhuman strength would not be a pointer that would bring us to the atomic throw in a satisfying way— it would make the atomic throw predictable and ordinary. It would be a standard payoff to a standard setup, the story of a really strong young man.

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The way the atomic throw is setup can’t be in the A + B = C universe. The pointers must stay in the uncertain kitchen. We are not allowed to actually evaluate Zak’s strength because the throw is a product of hope, a miracle of faith. So the pointers must share some of those immaterial qualities; they can’t be things that we can see when we look at them straight on. It is only at the end when we finally can look at them, see them, and understand how they have created our path. The uncertainty of the moments about Zak’s strength have caused our gaze to focus on something else—on the spectacle of a character’s will. We have never seen his strength, but we have always seen his will. Zak has set his entire being on a path, a quest, a journey for knowledge, and he will not stop until he has attained it. He is the hero of his own tale. The questions that we would normally be asking about his physical powers have instead been answered by something else, without our even knowing it. Will is a thing we cannot measure. It is the thing that since stories began has always been able to perform the atomic throw.

Your Best Title Is Always a Pointer A title invites you into the work and starts you forward on the path. A good title always feels and means, at the end, something completely different than it did when you walked in the door of the theatre. The experience of the work has filled it up and transformed it. And a great title, when we “get it,” is received inside the agency of a perception shift. Betrayal is a remarkable example of this. We have a cascade of perception shifts about what the title ultimately means. At the end of the play, we will have a perception shift that makes us understand that we are the ones who have been betrayed—we have moved forward through the play assuming that in the end we will witness Emma and Robert begin their affair and it will be a passionate, romantic scene. Instead, we discover that the affair we have been watching started inside a sordid, ugly, brutal moment. We are the ones who have been betrayed. The Importance of Being Earnest is a title that generates a delightful perception shift. As we move through the work, we think the primary importance of being Earnest is just in the name. We get the pun of course, but it seems to be about just the name. And then, at the end, a play that appears to be about nothing but triviality, is, in fact, about just the opposite.

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The play is about the importance of being earnest. It feels like such an effortless perception shift, firing off inside the wrong assumptions we have made.

Exercise: Finding Your Title Some people never have trouble finding the perfect title, it just seems to float up and present itself to them. Some people have the title long before they know they’ll be writing something to go with it, and so they make lists of titles, waiting for them to call a work to them. Sometimes, you have a title, but everyone tells you it’s horrible. When you are searching for the perfect title, it seems impossible to find one that invites the audience in, functions as a pointer, generates a perception shift so that it means something different to the audience after they’ve seen the work, and is unique and mysterious and instantly familiar. Still, you have to try. First, look for it in your script. The odds are pretty good that you will find a line or phrase that feels right. But if you can’t, this exercise may be able to help you call it into focus. Draw a large box on an entire piece of paper. Then, put these things in the corners and on the sides, anywhere along the boundaries of the box, to make an active space for the title to appear: strongest visual in the work strongest visual metaphor funniest line saddest line most interesting place—either actual or referred to in a dream

How Music Orchestrates Tone The movies are able to control the transmission of tone more completely than works for the stage—that’s one of the great strengths of the artform. First, we almost always see and hear a movie exactly the way the director wants us to. If we are unlucky enough to get seats too close to the screen, we may have difficulty with focus sometimes, but a romantic closeup will generally read as perfectly from every seat as a car crash does. And sound? We can hear every whisper, every sigh. Every moment on screen can be

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curated precisely, reliably so, repeatedly so. That means that the work’s tone is precisely calibrated, too. And film has something else to generate tone that a play generally does not—a soundtrack. This is different from the sound design for works for the stage. Unless the work is opera, or music theatre, or a work conceived where the composer is a lead collaborator, the sound is different each time the work is produced. And works for the screen rely on sound to create tone in a different way than plays do because they can—we don’t “notice” an orchestra swelling in the background in a film in the same way that we notice music in live theatre. We accept that the orchestra creating the music is an equivalent part of the artificiality of the screen experience more readily than we do in the theatre because there is a two-dimensional image in front of us instead of living, breathing human beings. Most movies would not be what they are without their soundtracks. I don’t know a single “straight” play that I’d say that about, although I know there must be some. Sound doesn’t add story, event, or character in what we think of as a traditional way, but what it does add are ways for the audience to engage with the work of art—ways for the film to be more and mean more. Soundtracks carry a film’s tone, and sometimes create it. Before Bernard Herrmann composed the score for Joseph Stefano/Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Hitchcock thought the film was so dull that he was going to cut it up and put it on TV. Then, Herrmann brought in a score that included the music he wrote for the shower scene. And it changed everything. Try this: turn the sound off on a movie you know fairly well, and put the captions on. Yes, this is an unfair test, because movies don’t exist completely in visual signal, and not being able to hear dialogue is severely limiting, along with the loss of the other kind of sounds you’ll be missing. But still. Try it. Try a few films. Try it with Hampton Fancher/David Peoples/Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Without the iconic Vangelis score it is a completely different and curiously blanker film. The Blade Runner score doesn’t tell you anything you can put into words, but it means more about the world of the film than you can put in words. That’s tone. It’s hard to say what it does and how it does it because that’s part of its job: to be something that can’t be reduced but still has the ability to carry infinite amounts of feeling and meaning. To be something created in the moment of reception, in time. For Blade Runner, and for many films, their score is a to-go bag, a way the audience can carry the entire tonal experience of the movie away with them.

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Running Gags In Beauty Queen, the play’s central organizing system involves doubling characters. This is the deep root of the play because the transformation of Maureen into Mag is where we are headed. Because of McDonagh’s comedic gifts, pointers to this event are all clustered inside character quirk, which means they register as comedy instead of something significant. The pleasure we get from these pervasive, persistent running gags cloaks their structural purpose. There is very little that can organize your work as brazenly while still hiding in plain sight as a running gag does. I use the term running gag as another way to talk about any pervasive and persistent system as it turns and changes. Skipping the stone is another simple way to describe it. Each skip is both like the one that came before it and also slightly different. The trajectory of the stone is clear, and reasonably predictable, but still not exactly predictable, and so it’s exciting to watch it play out. Same/not same. Skipping a stone is a moving, visual rhyme, and so is a running gag in our work. The deeply structural nature of running gags is that they organize a work while presenting themselves baldly—they hide their design and function right in front of us. Running gags have rules. Like a joke, like timebound art, they exist in the world of setup/payoff, of progression and turn. Running gags are repetition on a progressing scale. They can’t be exactly the same over and over unless that itself is the payoff—unending sameness against all expectation can sometimes be quite funny. But usually the “sameness” is in some way “same/not same,” or the situation when the running gag is fired is different each time, making it not same. It’s important to remember that not all running gags progress by each turn being funnier than the one that proceeded it. Sometimes, just a little variation, over and over again, or the sheer sustained accumulation of yet another firing off of the gag is enough. It is like the fifty-seventh spin that an ice skater does—each spin is identical to the last, no better, no worse, but the precision and the repetition of the same thing at a certain point becomes a kind of progression. And it seems to be a human truth about the way we respond to short things that artistry or skill turns into longer things: the pleasure that we get on the twenty-seventh skip is different, greater, better than the pleasure we got from the identical third. What’s special about a running gag is that we have a relationship with it, a kind of intimacy. The Importance of Being Earnest sets up the gag about cucumber sandwiches:

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Jack  Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young?

And then Jack tries to eat one. Algernon  Please don’t touch the cucumber sandwiches. They are ordered specially for Aunt Augusta. (Takes one and eats it.) Jack  Well, you have been eating them all the time. Algernon  That is quite a different matter. She is my aunt. (Takes plate from below.) Have some bread and butter. The bread and butter is for Gwendolen. Gwendolen is devoted to bread and butter.

And then, when Aunt Augusta arrives, it turns out that Algernon has eaten them all. Algernon (picking up empty plate in horror)  Good heavens! Lane! Why are there no cucumber sandwiches? I ordered them specially. Lane (gravely)  There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice. Algernon  No cucumbers! Lane  No, sir. Not even for ready money.7

We feel smart when a running gag progresses; we are “in” on the joke, we are in the know. It has a special ability to make us laugh because it is an old friend. And delightfully enough, at the end of the play, we will discover that Aunt Augusta is also Jack’s aunt, and he had as much right to eat the sandwiches as Algy did. Sitcoms, old style Sunday comics, cartoons, all these forms depend on the running gag to pull us in with an established relationship and give the creators a shorthand that enables them to speak in a shared “private language” over time. Seinfield was a perfect example of this. The whole show was a series of evolving, ever-progressing running gags, but Kramer’s entrances, and the way Jerry said “Newman,” were especially delightful, and almost identical, every time. They were a way to condense entire character aspects into a single moment’s gesture or outcropping. And if we are looking at running gags, we must mention the magnificent Mrs. Malaprop, from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, who is one of theatre’s most famous comedic characters. She is a living running gag, the “pineapple of perfection,” in this regard, and a malapropism—a name Sheridan appropriated from the

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French word malaprop for inappropriate—has become the shorthand for saying a thing almost right but in the end very wrong. Newman and Kramer are themselves flat characters in the truest sense of E. M. Forster’s definition: characters who serve the work but who do not have needs that require that the work serve them. Of course, over time, in a TV series or novel, they often turn into flat characters capable of roundness. Kramer becomes a full, round character at times. But he always goes flat again. This is another way of seeing how, when we talk about character, we are really talking about structure. Beauty Queen has a gorgeous, vital running gag system about the confusion of names that serves as a wonderful pointer. Ray can’t remember whether the American cousin is Dolores Healy or Dolores Hooley and says that if her name were Hooley, it would only take one letter to change it to Dooley if she married Pato. Which is exactly what happens. Is there a more delicious pointer? Hidden in plain sight, in the mouth of an idiot, deep in a system of fools who can’t keep the names of those around them straight, it tells us without telling us that Maureen and Pato will not be married, but that Dolores and Pato will. In the same way that in The Bone Violin we were conditioned to accept that a boy could become a bone violin, this running gag is training us to accept Maureen’s transformation into her mother as inevitable. The pleasure of a running gag happens deep in the context of any work of art that creates it, but in any work viewed with a live audience, a second context exists. A running gag exploits the fact that each audience member laughs because of the three or seven or twelve iterations of the gag that have already occurred, and that they are sitting surrounded by a hundred people who have also experienced the three or seven or twelve previous earlier iterations—the running gag creates a subtext of belonging and community, of sharing that is a meta-context inside the context of the movie or play. Belonging is a powerful drug.

A Play Always Tells the Truth, But It Enjoys Using Lies to Tell It We know that we want things from timebound art. They are a rehearsal for feelings we are ashamed of feeling or afraid of feeling or are not brave enough to feel, or maybe we’re just too young to have felt them yet. Or maybe we’re so old we’ve forgotten what they felt like. A really good work of art will make

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you feel things you have no idea you wanted to feel. It will use a lie that tells the truth, and it will tell it about you. A work of timebound art wants things from you. Alfred Hitchcock, a consummate manipulator, once said this about the audience to his collaborators: The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing.8 Sometimes, a work wants to hurt us, or seduce us into wanting something unsavory, or make us stop believing in something we believe in. Usually, it wants to change us in some way, and while that might be impossible? It will settle for becoming a part of the way we see our life. It will be content to manipulate us into feeling something we have never felt before. That is what feels like newness in our artform. Not something we haven’t seen before but something we haven’t felt before. A lie is almost always about wanting something. A lie has doubleness built right in—the same/not same of the lie and the truth. A lie is an almost kind of metaphor—after all, you are saying one thing and meaning another, but you are doing it in a strange, inverse relationship to the way metaphor works, with a wholly different purpose. Some cognitive scientists believe that we developed language, in part, in order to lie. We call being dishonest duplicity, which is of course another word for doubleness. Doubleness always delights us, and lies, when they are not at our expense, are fascinating. Lies, and the betrayal of trust that lying implies, often give a work of timebound art access to a hidden emotional world. They reveal desires that have stepped outside the bounds of our assumed contract with each other. It is in their assumptions that the audience makes the lies that tell the truth. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be straight-up lies, along the way.

Exercise: Lies It is a fact: there is almost nothing more interesting than watching a character lie when we know the truth. Remember that lies have utility—they protect someone, damn someone else, make something happen, keep other things from happening. For one of your characters, come up with any or all of the below:

1. a lie they tell about work or school 2. a lie about god 3. a lie about hair

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4. a lie that would give the character the courage to do something they are afraid of doing

Spoilers It’s funny that we never think of the last five or ten pages of a novel as potential spoilers, but the end of a book and its “secrets” are always right there. Jumping to the end was always an option, but when we were children we were told that reading the end before we got there was cheating. You were either the kind of kid who sneaked a peek or you weren’t, and you were proud of yourself either way. We weren’t able to see the end of a movie or a TV show out of sequence until recently, though. The ability to so easily peek at a movie’s ending or skip to the final episode of a TV series is a new phenomenon—previously, you could not get ahead of a show that was being aired, and if you missed an episode, only someone who had seen it could tell you what happened. Now we have access to the ends of hundreds of thousands of films and streaming shows. And so, the phrase spoiler alert has become more and more a common part of our experience as the opportunities to discover events and endings out of sequence have become more available, either by fast forwarding a movie or reading the ubiquitous reviews or random comments on the ranking websites. But it turns out that spoilers don’t spoil an experience. Even though it seems counterintuitive, a recent study seems to prove that we may enjoy works of art more when we are given one. Test subjects were sorted into three groups, and each was asked to read the same story. 1. The first group was given the story to read, with no spoiler of any kind. 2. The second group was given the story, with an artful spoiler inserted into it. 3. The third group read the same story, but it had the addition of an obvious spoiler, which happened in a paragraph before the story began. I honestly thought that, given the three choices, the preference would be for the second one, the artful spoiler. But it turns out that people liked the third kind of spoiler best—they liked the spoiler separate from the story, not cloaked or disguised in any way. Apparently, we like our spoilers easy

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to understand and straightforward in how they function. We like knowing where we are going. No one likes total uncertainty. Spoilers help us understand what is happening, and help us organize and understand where we are in a work of art. A pointer’s “semi-permeable membrane” lets only our unconscious brain apprehend it fully—but our conscious brain still takes it in, if incompletely, and keeps us on the path. And if we do receive the spoiler fully, and know exactly what is about to happen in the end, we may not mind because we like feeling the process more than we like the surprise. And this is part of the enormous popularity of historical and true-life drama, a genre that is based on reduced uncertainty. A work of historical drama is itself a meta-spoiler. With a work based on a person’s life or historical event, we know what will happen. And, more importantly, in terms of anticipation, we know how it will spool out, we know its clock. But the characters do not. This makes the plot and story radically different. And it means we have the double pleasure of being secure in knowing what will happen next, as well as the pleasure of knowing more than the characters know about what will happen to them. In a way, “a real-life event” replaces the idea of fate. It is similar to what happens when we watch Oedipus, where we have the pleasure of knowing more about him than he does himself, coupled with the pleasure of watching as he learns what we know. Alternative history novels and movies that alter the facts have an additional trick up their sleeve. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where a stuntman (spoiler alert!) saves Sharon Tate’s life, takes pleasure in adding a third twist to our experience. We know what will happen, the characters don’t, and then—surprise!—it turns out we don’t know either. Our knowledge of the clock of the story of the Titanic is a large part of Titanic’s plot. The historical event’s clock and its urgencies create the story we’re watching, of course, but for us, this knowledge is more active as part of the plot, not the story. People watch Titanic over and over and over again, but knowing that it is going to sink and Jack is going to freeze and John Jacob Astor and all those families below decks are going to go down with the ship does not diminish our hope—it instead heightens it. This is because there is a third clock that organizes historical works, one that lives inside our knowledge of what and when things are going to happen. It is a clock made out of our intimacy with the event itself, an event that, when it comes to the Titanic, we have known about our entire lives. It is a clock that is powered by the insistence of hope. Ask your friends if

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they think they would have found a way to survive the sinking if they had been a passenger on the ship. One of them will probably say, “I would have lashed three deck chairs together and sat on top of them until the rescue ships arrived.” Leonardo DiCaprio, over twenty-five years after the making of Titanic, still has to fend off fans asking him why he didn’t get on that door with Rose. Our hope, shaped by our knowledge of the event, which includes how little time we would have had once we hit the frigid water, not our ignorance of it, still drives us relentlessly to hope in spite of that knowledge. Hope never runs out.

Preloads When real-life events become a story, the fact that their clocks are known to the audience is one of the reasons why true stories are so effective. Their endings are truly inevitable. When the audience comes into the theatre or turns on their screen, they already feel so many things, they already care about where they are going, they already know the clock is ticking and how long before time’s up. An enormous part of the work’s plot is already written inside them by their foreknowledge of the story. Any story we already know is a preload because the audience arrives pre-invested in what is going to happen. Normally, a spoiler and a preload are two different things. A spoiler informs the audience of what is going to happen, and a preload is an audience’s previous relationship with something. With historical and truelife stories, however, the two merge into one. In the first episode of Season Four of Peter Morgan’s The Crown, we meet the very young Diana Spenser hiding behind a large potted plant. She is hoping to get a glimpse of Prince Charles, who is dating her older sister. She is dressed as a tree—she has just come from rehearsal for her school play and is still in costume. It is an enchanting scene. We are watching a prince falling in love with a woodland sprite, a scene out of a fairy tale, and every second of it is filled with our knowledge of the great unhappiness that is to follow, of the inevitability of Diana’s fate. But rather than spoiling the charm of the scene, our foreknowledge does the opposite—it makes every second of their encounter ache with unbearable sweetness. We hang on each word, each sidelong glance, each exquisite little circle around the potted plant. We hope that these moments will stay, even though we know they cannot. Every time we see the young, wide-eyed Diana in the show’s first season, her death in

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the car crash is almost another character in the room. We carry the burden of our knowledge of the looming disaster she is walking headlong into, and its inevitability makes every moment ring, it fills every word and deed and gesture with immense meaning. A meaning that is heavy with the weight of endless what ifs. That is the great gift of a true-life preload—instead of spoiling our hopes or diminishing them, it gives the work the ability to carry twice or three times the amount of meaning it normally could, because the audience has come to the work already carrying almost all of its weight. The audience carries with them the preloaded emotions that they will pour into the moments they see before them. In the end, we like knowing where we are going because we are on a treasure hunt, and a map shows us where to look. We also will have less uncertainty moment to moment. Robert Zemeckis, who directed all three of the Back To The Future films, said he had always wanted to do an action movie that took place on a train. So he was thrilled when the third movie in the trilogy featured a train rather than the DeLorean to achieve timeescaping velocity. He said the reason why movies on trains are so wonderful to direct is that in most action films, directors have to spend so much time making sure the audience knows where the good guys and the bad guys are heading. In a train movie, no one has to spend any time and attention making sure the audience knows where the train is going—it’s going where the tracks go. This leaves the directors free to use their audience’s attention on other things. Preloads serve the same function as train tracks. They keep the audience moving unerringly straight forward. Knowing the surprises in a work doesn’t spoil our experience, ultimately, because we do not come to the theatre or go to the movies to be surprised— we go to experience a sequence of events and make meaning from it. There is a difference between knowing and experiencing, almost as if the two things happen in different parts of our brain. Yes, a plot uses the surprises that happen in story, and a story surprise can have a lot of power, but ultimately the surprise that matters will matter in terms of insight, not in terms of event. Your work matters and makes meaning in the audience with its plot, not its story. This is the difference between knowing and experiencing—knowing matters so little, and experiencing matters so much. We see the evidence of this in repeatability, because if knowing what was going to happen were the point of engaging with a work of art, then we would never see anything twice. Teenagers would not have gone to see Star Wars twenty-five times, and flocked over and over again to Twilight. I would not have watched The Shawshank

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Redemption every time it was on TBS. Half the shows on Broadway would not be revivals, and the other half would not be adaptations.

Exercise: Identifying Pointers When I was in graduate school, we had to read the first fifteen to twenty minutes of a play, then the last fifteen to twenty minutes, and then start over again at the beginning and read the entire play down. This was a durable way to heighten our awareness of structure and put the beginning and the ending of a play in close juxtaposition to make their relationship clear and active. It artificially made the play’s ending a spoiler that made us hyperaware of pointers.



1. Read the first scene of Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire. Then, read the last scene of the play. Then, read the play from the beginning. Identify the pointers. Doing this will change the way you see not just the beginning but the middle of a play. We talk so much about beginnings and endings. But the middle is the place where the systems of a work surge and become full and resonant, it’s where the characters act out of desire and fear, it’s a rich territory of hope and event, and we can see the way the pointers lead us through it. But there is one problem. Doing this may ruin the play for you. You will be robbed of the surprise when you come to the end that will blossom into insight. This is the cost. You’ve been warned. But most of the time, it’s worth it. You will still experience the play’s perception shift, if it is embedded deeply in the work. 2. Read the first twenty minutes and the last twenty minutes of Long Day’s Journey and the first and last scene of True West. Then, start at the beginning and read straight through, looking for pointers. Focus on the use of alcohol in both plays. In True West, Lee and Austin drink and get drunk. They use alcohol to avoid behaving like civilized men, to help them behave like beasts. This makes the beers they drink part of the primary system of the play, so alcohol is important, but it’s an ordinary, run of the mill use of it. The brothers drink, they get drunk, they behave badly. Their inner animals roam the stage, and big, ugly, loud things happen. This is a pretty generic use of alcohol.

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But in Long Day’s Journey, alcohol is the visible, liquid double of money and all the feelings associated with it—shame, stinginess, blame, regret, betrayal. It is entangled with dead fathers and Tyrone’s constant abandonment of his young bride on the road. Every time we see the whiskey—and see the watering down to hide it, or hear about the fact that it is under lock and key, or that it is used in place of wages for the help—we see not just its value in the moment but we also feel the echoes of all its uses. The whiskey ripples through so many moments that by the time Mary gives some to Cathleen we look at it and we see the whole play. And the more they drink, the more they deny the truth, and the more readily they then accept it and forgive it. And all that denial and forgiveness is the central movement of the play. The whiskey continually points our attention into the heart of the play. It’s a pervasive part of the story, and it also functions as a pointer. But the alcohol in True West functions as beer and champagne. It makes Lee and Austin drunk. It helps them both escape from civilized behavior, and descend into the wilderness, and that’s essential. But the beer is not telling the history of the men or their families or their struggles. It’s just beer. Two plays, both using alcohol in completely different ways. It is a pointer in one, not in the other. 3. If you look again at Rabbit Hole, Long Day’s Journey, and True West, you’ll notice that there are no pointers in their last fifteen to twenty minutes. Of course, each play has a different clock, but try to identify exactly when the pointers stop, and why.

Recognizing Pointers in Your Own Work When you get to the end of the first draft of your timebound work, and the full arc is complete for the first time, go back to the beginning and look for pointers. When you identify them, they will be the key to understanding how your final convergence works, and how to do any refinements to shape it. Trust me. There will be pointers. Writers generate them out of pure instinct. I’ve never seen a writer who doesn’t. The danger is that your

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instincts, which served you so well when you were writing the first draft, and which you obeyed because you didn’t know exactly where you were going and how you would get there, will not always be able to stand up to you now that you think you know where you have gotten and how to get there better. Your reasonable writing self will try to make you erase the little mysteries, the things that don’t make immediate sense. You will be encouraged by any number of well-meaning people to make your work clear. You must resist the urge to clarify—you can’t possibly know what clear even means in the context of your work until you see it on its feet. Remember that productive confusion and plain old confusion are two different things. Try to see the difference. Resist the urge to remove any anomalous signal. Sometimes, with lies that tell the truth, you won’t know the truth it is telling until you have fully engaged with and understood the shape that truth is taking in your work—a truth that is unavailable to you until you fully understand the end of it. Look for pattern and paths of significance before you make your work smooth and unruffled. Sometimes, we make our work make sense instead of meaning. And making sense and making meaning are two different things.

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Convergence What happens at the end of a timebound work of art? Most of our vocabularies call it a climax. But what really happens is this: everything the audience and the work have spent their time together creating comes together. It is the moment that all the pointers have been leading the audience to hope for and to value. It is when a final turn gathers up all the organizing systems in its inevitable embrace and braids them together. It is the convergence of all that is the story with all that is the plot. The work’s final perception shift fits perfectly into a slot the audience isn’t aware they have been constructing, in the same way that a punch line in a joke is a surprisingly perfect fit. The audience doesn’t see it coming, but when it lands, the surprise they feel is satisfying because it has been shaped, satisfying because it feels so suddenly inevitable, and satisfying because the insight it generates matters to them. The concept of a climax seems too narrow to contain everything that happens in the audience and in the work when it comes to its end. It’s true we are used to using “climax” when we talk about the end of a work, and it’s a familiar term— we use the word in everyday life to describe the explosion, implosion, and high point/conclusion of many things. But our preloaded relationship with climax may limit how we look at the way our artform works. And that means that we need to find a way to talk about what happens at the end of a work that is bigger than the single moment that a climax tends to describe.

It’s Never a Single Moment Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman ends with a sequence of three deaths that create a wild sequence of choice and consequence, of death and event. But if we look at

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the play, it’s hard to identify where this sequence actually begins. We can follow the breadcrumbs back through the play to see how these events happen, but we can find no clear line of demarcation at all for the start of them. The play’s end has its feet in every moment. Nothing is isolated, everything connects with everything that came before it and after it. The word climax does not work when describing the size and embrace of this kind of movement. Thinking about what happens at the end of a work as convergence, rather than climax, gives us a better chance to identify the moment when the gathering of its forces begins in earnest. A climax tends to describe the result of a single stream of action, while a convergence feels more like the confluence of more than one tributary—it feels more like the nature and flow of life. Since the longings and disappointments and joys of human beings spool out over time, we shouldn’t be surprised to see that “the end” of a work is more like an “ending period” that can begin ten, twenty, thirty minutes before the curtain comes down. In some plays, it feels like this movement begins the moment the curtain rises, and these plays are relentless, nearperfect pieces of timebound art. Works that converge over their entire length overturn our expectations in unexpected ways because they don’t behave according to any preconceived ideas about “rising action” or any other formulaic pattern. Convergence has an alchemical ability to merge anything in our work, to fit pieces together whose edges we would swear could never fit, to answer questions we were not aware we were asking with answers that seem both inevitable and impossible at the same time. “The best of our plays teach us that we have been asking the wrong questions or asking them in the wrong way” Okkie Brownstein said. “We have been looking at the play’s world through the lens of an inadequate frame of reference.”1 A convergence does not necessarily respect our standard ideas of structural boundaries, and may gather the forces of a work together in ways that reject the rules for the way a traditional climax is assumed to operate. Some people say that trying to use a lyrical solution to a narrative problem is an impossible thing. It is true you can’t resolve in one when you’ve set up in another—unless they have converged. This is the great power of convergence—like a crucible, it transforms everything that comes together inside it into something new and adamantine. How do we recognize this in our work, how do we set up this convergence, how do we shape it? It is part of the relationship of beginning to end, and this fact is essential to our craft. It is the same/not same that we are always heading for, it is the concluding rhyme of the rhyme scheme of the entire

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work of art. Your play or film is reaching forward to a moment that has this relationship with its beginning, which is a relationship that runs its entire length. The end of a timebound work is always calling the rest of it to it. At the moment of a great final perception shift, we understand something that is almost impossible: it is not that the ending is made out of what has come before it but that what has come before is made out of the end. In all great works of timebound art, when the end arrives, we realize that we have had this date from the beginning. Beauty Queen’s convergence lasts for the entire last scene. It is one of the most beautifully sustained perception shifts in memory, and as its truth sinks in, the audience is given time to rewrite the entire play they have just seen. Streetcar’s convergence begins at Blanche’s birthday party and then grows in power and intensity until she is taken away at the end of the play. If we look at True West, the mother’s return signals the start of its convergence. She is here to highlight that civilization has lost to the wilderness, and the start of the brothers’ savage battle is the peak of this period. The Ferryman’s final convergence starts when it is revealed to the family that Seamus Carney is not lost or in America but dead at the hand of the IRA. The strength of this reveal (not a reveal for us—Seamus’s death is known to the audience from the very beginning of the play) is in the choices it forces from characters we care about on stage. It rips through the play with astonishing force. Everything that has mattered to the characters and to us converges and shatters. The ultimate utility of a timebound work of art grows out of its story and plot being strong and true enough to converge significantly with the story and plot of the greater world we live in. Its final convergence is when the “weight” the work is carrying lands and its “meaning” flares up inside its audience. It is at the moment of convergence that we see just how much meaning a work of art can make in the audience.

Exercise: The End and the Beginning Draw three pictures of the play or film you’re writing:

1. First moment 2. A representation of the music if your work were a piece of music— don’t write the music, but draw a visual representation of it. 3. Last moment

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These can be as abstract or as representational as you like. I recommend not being confined by your artistic abilities—this is about emotional truth, not about finely wrought images. This exercise can be done multiple times during the writing of a work, whenever you want to take a non-narrative break from thinking about it. These drawings should be done quickly. They should be forward-reaching. Keep these drawings and compare them to each other as you continue writing. Notice the elements that change and the ones that don’t.

Is Saying That Convergence Is Everywhere in a Great Work of Timebound Art the Same Thing as Saying That a Great Work of Timebound Art Is All Convergence? Can a work of art be all convergence? And, if it could, would that be desirable? Wouldn’t the audience become overwhelmed in a kind of sameness if everything is converging all the time without what we think of as requisite highs and lows, peaks and valleys? How will the audience know what to value if everything is becoming everything else? Betrayal seems pretty close to a seamless, unrelenting merge, but Pinter has an ability to keep us moving forward with very little ground to actually walk on. He feeds us “information” and ways to feel about what is happening so sparingly that we don’t achieve critical mass until the final moments of the play. The film Arrival, on the other hand (spoiler alert!), because it is about the fact that past, present, and future are all “one,” comes very close (in retrospect) to constant convergence because of all of the moments that we see and assume are flashbacks. Its strategy is to allow our understanding of the way time works to blind us to what is really happening—it’s a brilliant example of hiding in plain sight. At the film’s final reveal the flashbacks suddenly fold in on themselves, showing us the truth of what we’ve seen. And the film is filled with pointers that

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lead to profound perception shifts—my favorite is the moment when the aliens say that “there is no time,” and panic sets in because everyone believes they are being told that the end of the world is about to happen. But the aliens are instead just speaking the truth: there is no time. The earthlings are terrified by nothing but their own assumptions. It’s a perfect pointer. But it’s important to recognize that Betrayal and Arrival function on different surfaces of our inherent understandings of what time is. Betrayal exploits our relationship with time to manipulate us. Arrival exploits our assumptions about our relationship with time to manipulate us— assumptions that are at the very core of our understanding about what life is. The perception shift happens entirely inside these assumptions. We understand at convergence (spoiler alert!!! Really, don’t read this if you haven’t seen the film) that what we thought were memories of the past (as all memories, we assume, are) were actually memories of the future, and that the dying child that Louise loves and grieves for was conceived after she learned the language of the aliens, the language that lets her see her past, present, and future together. So, she had a baby, even though she knew that the child would die. Even though she knew the horrible pain and sorrow she would feel, even though she knew her husband would leave her when he found out that she had known, even though she spends every moment of joy with her child linked to the knowledge of her death. She has made a choice that takes our breath away. When we realize what we have actually been seeing whenever we saw her with her child, the entire film is rewritten in a flash. It is one of the most astonishing, heartbreaking, satisfying perception shifts in a film in recent memory. It is also weight-bearing—it links up to our own lives, and the world we live in with a gorgeous assertion of the value of love, and becomes a deeply human and redemptive film. A movie that appeared to be about aliens, language, and time is instead about something else entirely. The film has found a new and surprising way to assert one of the fundamental truths about how our fear of mortality is not stronger than our drive to love. The insight that a perception shift causes to blossom inside us creates/ suggests/asserts a congruency in us that matches the values of the work itself. Value is what we ultimately produce. This transformed understanding of what has value—this change in our way of seeing the world—is the thing that our emotional, empathetic self carries away from a work, thanks to the insight generated by a perception shift.

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Satisfying versus Meaningful Once when I was teaching at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, I woke up in the middle of the night to someone pounding on the door downstairs. It was a little after one o’clock. No good can come of this, I thought. And went back to sleep. The next day, around nine in the morning, the pounding on the door started again. It was broad daylight, so I went downstairs and opened the door. It was one of my students. They grabbed me and hugged me. They were extremely excited. “I finally got it,” they said, and grabbed me and hugged me harder, “I got it. I understand what a perception shift is. I went to see 12 Monkeys!” Their excitement was overwhelming. They proceeded to tell me the entire plot and story of 12 Monkeys. I tried very hard not to listen. I hadn’t seen it yet. Later, I saw 12 Monkeys. I loved it. It did have a very satisfying perception shift. The final moments (fueled by two reveals, the final one that feels relentlessly and retrospectively inevitable) gather up the entire movie and transform it. David People’s/Janet People’s/Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys is a great time-travel tragedy, chock full of hope, with a perception shift that lands and fills us with the opposite of what hope is. But, as in most time-travel narratives, the meaning is closely limited or dictated by the rules of time travel itself. Here, the hero, played by Bruce Willis (spoiler alert!!!), causes the plague he returns from the future to eradicate by inadvertently giving a mad scientist the idea to create it. We see the final scene, which we have seen often in his memories, and finally understand what we are seeing—we have a perception shift. The end is not just made out of the beginning; the beginning is the end, the ending is the beginning, and so on. It is made relentlessly out of itself. So it satisfies because formal satisfaction is always satisfying. But, as Richard Powers says in The Overstory: “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.”2

The Turn In our everyday lives, we talk about perception shifts all the time, but we don’t call them that. When we talk about perception shifts in stories, movies, jokes, commercials, or in our lives, we call them story twists, or revelations,

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or the moment when the scales fall from our eyes, and often, we call them a turn. A turn of events. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn. Turnabout is fair play. Turn over a new leaf. Turn on—as in take a drug to achieve a different state, or have someone sexually excite you, or turn you on to a new band. Turn on—as in betray. Turning a river in its course. Turning the other cheek. The language is filled with phrases about the turn. It turns out that the turn is a constant in all text-based artforms, not just ours. In poetry, it is the final blossoming perception shift that opens up the poem and enfolds all its meaning. In novels and stories, it is known as the essential turn of events, or the surprise twist at the end—not all short stories have a turn, but more do than don’t. “Luke, I am your father” is the twist that organizes all the epic, endlessly rebooted bildungsroman that is Star Wars. And the turn also organizes timebound artforms that are not text-based. In dance terminology, the turn is a constant component of the dance, from a simple turn to a tango chain step to a spinning pirouette. In music, the turn is chiefly thought of as the return, and in a classically structured work, the return of the pattern and the reprise is often the whole basis of a piece’s musical structure. In both of these artforms, the turn is usual, necessary, vital, and commonplace. It is a building block–tool that is used as a matter of course. It is understood that the turn is the organizing ground on which the piece stands. The formula for a magic trick is straight out of our timebound art vocabulary—it is all setup and payoff, it is all performance, it is all about the audience and the moment when they have a perception shift. The turn is the moment when the audience at a magic show goes “Ah!!! Oh!!! Now I see!” and sees something impossible that is somehow happening right in front of them. The turn is the moment the arrow of a magic trick is let fly, and it hits every single target in the room. The turn is a rhyme we ache for, because it can live in the world with us. It doesn’t have to happen in language but occurs in event and action. The meaning it makes is not limited by words and so is not mediated by language. It never loses anything in translation, and so works of art with strong turns and twists tend to be universal in their appeal. The turn means the change. And we are obsessed with change. The drama is about nothing except our desperate need to change, when we know we cannot.

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Exercise: Noticing Perception Shifts Write down every perception shift you experience for a week in life, in poems, in movies, in plays, commercials, and jokes. Examine the way the perception shifts are set up and how they fire. Think about what exactly the perception shift does to you—what is it that you now “see” differently? You will discover perception shifts everywhere. And every one of them will be satisfying—that’s the definition of a perception shift, it is a machine that delivers. But the quality of meaning that the perception shift generates inside the spectator is another thing. There is no insight without surprise because you must disarm your audience so that new logic can slip in, but sometimes we encounter machines that disarm us, surprise us, and stop there. Jokes and commercials and encounters in daily life often do this but do not give us more than a bare instant of a new way of seeing before they fade—and that’s fine. But the play or movie you are writing is being created to use the machinery of surprise to exploit an opening inside the spectator and carry a way to make meaning into them through it. So, the more aware you are of the way the mechanism works, the better you’ll become at building something that can carry the weight you intend it to.

Convergence and Reveal It is true that a powerful reveal, one that is shaped properly and falls backward and rewrites the entire work we’ve just seen, can create a satisfying and meaningful ending. But if a work’s biggest reveal happens in the middle, rather than starting the convergence period, it will, after shocking and surprising us, minute by minute, lose its power to act as a gravitation force to pull the work together and create a meaningful final perception shift. Not many surprises have the power to generate forward-directed desires that can last half an hour or more and continue to force choices. A reveal can be a kind of stop, in a way, because wanting to know what has already happened has less nextness than wanting to know what will happen next. A reveal’s essential quality is to rewrite the past, and even though constant falling back/re-seeing/re-understanding is the dynamic core of what happens in our audiences, this will diminish the power of the work if it happens at the expense of our forward longings.

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A tragedy can never have a reveal for its final convergence—the whole point of a tragedy is that we watch the hero make a choice and then see the price she pays for it. A reveal is usually a choice that has been kept secret, and the choices of the past can rarely compete with a choice made in front of our eyes. Often, of course, another choice is caused by the reveal, and these kinds of endings involve the dynamic forces of the play in a way that can create powerful convergences. The Ferryman is a tragedy that is a good example of a reveal causing a cascade of choices. A shocking reveal can shock us at any point in a work. But shock fades. The “what if ” that engages with a choice’s consequences can linger inside us indefinitely. In the end, the best way to think about a convergence is to look at the perception shift it generates in the audience. Some works have convergences that happen completely on the story surface, and some happen almost completely on the plot surface with only the barest elements of the story involved. But the more the perception shift happens inside the audience and not on stage or screen, the more it happens inside their hopes and meaning-making. And that means the convergence will have more power and resonance. What we make inside ourselves is always more valuable to us. Think of the power of the end of The Beauty Queen of Leenane—it is fueled completely by the perception shift we have when we realize that we have seen everything in the play incorrectly.

Enlarging the Idea of Dramatic Event We have been taught to see that the biggest event of a play or movie is the climax (e.g., a character killing their mother with a poker). But the biggest events are the ones that happen to us, in our assumptions and the overturning of them. The truest events, the ones that matter the most, happen inside us. The end of a timebound work doesn’t need to have a murder or betrayal to create an enormous impact or feel to the audience like an event. A choice to act or not act—either can be devastating or exhilarating. The audience’s understanding of what they have witnessed, and what it means to them, can be as huge a cascade of feeling as any action is. As writers, as long as we think that a dramatic event means an action like a murder, or a shocking reveal, or some other stereotypical “big” action, we will always have a limited understanding of what happens to the audience at the end of a work and how, as writers, to craft it.

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It’s necessary to expand our understanding of event to truly understand the way convergence works. In Margaret Edson’s Wit, we arrive exactly where we have been told we are headed: Vivian tells us straight up, “I die at the end.” What we do not know, and could not have anticipated, is how we will feel when it happens. We will have no defenses to the depth of our sorrow, as we will have none to fend off the terrible force of the hope we had for her. This is an event that has no boundaries. It happens inside us, brutally, and gloriously. Vivian’s death, and how we feel about it and her, has in every way been transformed during the course of the play. There is no surprise on the story line at the end— but on the plot line there is the surprise of our insight itself. It’s a ravishing ending, converging all the systems of the play. Baltimore Waltz, by Paula Vogel, functions in a similar way. We know, because we have read the letter at the beginning of the play, where we are headed. Why doesn’t it make our journey pointless when we knew the ending in advance? What does it do to our experience to know versus not to know? What kinds of surprises are left when we know the ending of the story? Baltimore Waltz’s gorgeous ending is pointed to throughout the work, using multiple strategies on multiple surfaces. First, she uses the heartbreaking letter from her brother to direct our gaze and shape our attention. Then she uses doubles—the conceit of Acquired Toilet Disease as a double for AIDS, and she presents “herself,” rather than her brother, as the one who is dying. The conceits of the play, which are clever and playful, deliver delight until near the end of the play, and the play’s great “trick” is that at its end—when we can no longer resist the truth of the play, when we must accept that we have always been in a hospital room in Baltimore and were never in Europe, which is what the letter from the brother told us at the start—we feel heartbroken that this is true. We are complicit in the what if that Vogel has spun around the inevitable. Vogel has pulled off something very special. Her loss has somehow become ours, because we built it inside ourselves. Nothing that we saw on stage was ever real, but we believed in it anyway, because it was a way to hold back the truth. It was a way to hope. There is no insight without surprise, so the surprise in Waltz must happen some place other than the story of the play, because the letter at the start tells us exactly what is truly happening. If it doesn’t happen in the story, then it must happen in the plot. The surprise is our own experience. Our response and what it means to us is the surprise. What it means to us is the event.

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Writing Exercise: The Dramatic Future Pick a film or play you’ve always liked. Write a three-page scene that happens a year after its ending.

The Difference between What Happens on Stage or Screen and What Happens in the Audience At convergence, it’s essential that everyone in the audience has a perception shift, but it isn’t essential that a character does. And when a character has a perception shift at convergence—but we don’t—it limits the ultimate power of the piece. In Andrew Niccol/Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, a prescient movie about reality TV and the media, Truman has a huge perception shift when he discovers that his world is a manufactured reality. But we have known almost since the beginning that he is living inside a TV show. We do want to know what will happen when he finds out. And we’re glad when he makes the choice to leave and have a real life. The reveal does cause a choice—but it doesn’t cause us to have a perception shift. In Beauty Queen, when Ray comes to tell her the news of Pato’s wedding, Maureen vaguely comprehends the truth—that the night she killed her mother she couldn’t have spoken to Pato on the platform at the station because he was never there. So we see her have some kind of a dim, confused perception shift. But the perception shift we have at this moment is global— when we find out that Pato had left already, that he never asked her to go to America with him, and that Maureen killed her mother not to escape and find her happiness, but out of sheer rage or delusion—everything changes. The play has gotten us to build and load not a double-barreled shotgun but two guns—one we can see, and one that is hidden behind our back. We thought the event of the play was our realization that Maureen had killed her mother. But that’s just the start of the convergence period. It hits its peak when Ray arrives with his news. In a flash we see the real play we have actually watched: Maureen has been insane from the start, and she has always tortured and abused her mother. And we also, if we are paying close attention, understand that Maureen would never have been allowed to leave

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with Pato because she was only released from the mental institution into her mother’s custody. There was never any possibility that she could have the happy life that we hoped for her so fervently. We thought we were building and loading one gun, and we discover that the gun that is aimed at our heart is a completely different one. A perception shift like this makes everything in the work happen new in the moment of the convergence. Not all timebound works manage to transform their entire length and breadth at this moment, but in our best plays and films, at the moment of their final perception shift, a huge amount of the piece slams into our awareness/understanding of what is happening and transforms into something new. All at the same moment.

Why a Perception Shift Makes Things Weightless A perception shift pulls everything into the present moment and makes it new because we have a new way of seeing it. This new way of seeing makes the work’s meanings and all the memories and moments that created them new and so light that it costs the audience nothing to carry them into the next moment. This means your audience doesn’t have to worry about spending their attention on remembering minute ten or twenty or thirty-seven— every time the present moment changes their assumptions or perceptions about something that happened in the past, the past becomes present. This is how a perception shift works the magic that lets it defy gravity and erase time. The point in creating an ever-expanding present moment is that it makes a work of timebound art so light that the audience can easily carry its insights and meaning out of the theatre and into their lives. When the lie that tells the truth at the heart of a work is fully revealed, we realize that the laws of gravity as we had understood them are all wrong. In Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, the final moments turn the entire play into a metaphor about our responsibility for the existence of the human race. This might seem to be an impossibly heavy thing, but the primary narrative engine that has brought us to this moment—the slowly revealed workings of a love triangle—make it possible. And having made it possible, the love triangle falls away, into a side note, its gravities vanish, and the great heart of the matter rises up and blossoms. The final meaning is immeasurable in its weight. But because it has been made by a series of perception shifts generated by a slow drip of

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reveals, and because our perception/understanding continues to deepen and grow after the play is over, the meaning can continue to accumulate mass and weight, and we will still be able to carry it. Perception shifts are essential for our artform, because meaning— responsibility for the survival of the human race, for instance—is heavy, and once it gets tied down to the parts of the work that create it, it can accumulate, making it harder and harder for the audience to move forward. Some writers develop a style that limits both meaningful event and anticipation of it in order to make their works light and friction free, so that they can move their audiences from one place to another easily over the course of the work. Some works, especially hyper-realistic plays, appear to withhold transformation and insight until almost the last second. They do not rely on perception shifts throughout their sometimes substantial length. Instead, they sharply restrict weight, making the moments of the play small and insubstantial, making transformation unnecessary. This is a strategy for making meaning, like any other. But a perception shift can make meaning weightless at any time during a work—weightless not in the sense of how much it means but how much it costs the audience to carry it. When a perception shift makes what is happening weightless, the audience can be carried anywhere. The work has the possibility of limitless emotional travel at the biggest of these moments, and of course, the moment with the greatest ability to carry us the furthest is the final convergence of all the pointers: all the lies that tell the truth, all the things that made us look forward, all the laws of gravity as we had mistakenly understood them. In Ruined, the final, and most profound perception shift happens when Mama reveals that she is ruined. The ruined system is so strong that nearly every moment of the play becomes re-contextualized when we discover this. This perception shift rewrites the entire play. We understand how little we had understood before about Mama’s actions, as the true weight of her choices now becomes evident. Ruined is not so much building and loading another gun to ambush us with as it is creating a completely credible landscape that our perception shift will make disappear when it reveals the true lay of the land. Again, this resembles the magic act where the magician pulls the tablecloth out from under a perfectly set table, leaving it completely undisturbed. But instead of the original china and silverware and crystal now resting on a bare table, it turns out that underneath the tablecloth there is a second perfectly set table, on a tablecloth with different china and silverware and crystal. I’m not sure where the original place settings go in this metaphor. As far as I can tell?

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They were never real, because they only existed in our assumptions. So they just vanish.

Writing Exercise: The Last Forty-Five Seconds, Again This time, the exercise asks you to use the “rhyme scheme” or the rules of something other than a sonnet to imagine and write the last forty-five seconds of your movie or play. What you write can of course be longer than forty-five seconds, as long as you see it as existing inside the last forty-five seconds of your work. Write the last forty-five seconds as if it were:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

a visual image happening in a genre like sci-fi or a western an opera a Shakespeare play a reality TV show as if it had the qualities of your father’s bathrobe

How Coincidence Is a Form of Rhyme A good rhyme is not accidental, it just feels that way. Coincidence in a work of art is never accidental either. In real life, we tend to believe that in order for a coincidence to happen, unseen primal forces are required. And it is no different in our artform where it is planted and plotted because a work that convergences inside a coincidence has to be shaped as precisely—perhaps even more precisely—than other convergences. In life, coincidence is the sudden appearance of a match—and that means meaning—that bubbles up into the randomness of our lives. If we are at the grocery store and the total for our groceries is $42.19, and the address of the house we grew up in was 4219 Brentwood, we feel an instant of specialness, the proof of a universe that recognizes us. Clearly, a message from the cosmos. But $42.19 means nothing to anyone but us. We provide the significance, the meaning, we connect the dots. We are the context that makes a match significant and assigns meaning to it.

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In art, coincidence is the sudden apparently unplanned appearance of match in the convergence of apparently unrelated things. In plays and films, coincidence happens when systems merge—both inside themselves and when multiple systems come together. In The Importance of Being Earnest, this happens often inside the delightful name system, which is turned and re-turned, over and over throughout the play. But it also flows into and runs alongside the mistaken identity system, the cucumber sandwich/cake-andbread-and-butter systems, the class/servant system, and the town/country system. A string of delightful doubles that merge. The play is a perfect example of how a play’s corset strings pull everything tightly together—each system touches virtually every other system, and the pleating at convergence lines up every part of this play. Coincidence is anything but random or accidental, when it is done well. It is a triumph of relentless plotting. Earnest displays that most marvelous of all of rhyme’s fundamental traits—the surprise that is completely prepared—and yet is still somehow completely surprising. It sparkles all the way down. The desires of all the characters align and pleat perfectly with all the other characters’ desires. The combined organizing power of the name Earnest (with its contrast double, Bunbury) and its lowercase twin, earnest (with its contrast double, triviality), is strong enough to line up an entire play so that every single thing in it calls to a double. The final convergence gathers everything neatly into a single fold. The play moves like a stone skipping across the water: it is simple and elegant, it is miraculous in its gravity-defying flight, it is beautiful to watch from beginning to end. Who stops watching a stone skipping before it stops? No one. It casts a little mesmerizing spell. Timebound dramatic art is the biggest form of rhyme. Its surface exists as the mirrored reflection of the audience—it is the lives of the audience members, in the end, that are rhymed.

Open Endings Some years ago, a married man tried to get a friend of mine into bed. He said he had an open marriage. She asked, “Is it open, or just sloppy?” Either way, she wasn’t interested. But she was interested to know if he knew the difference. Open to interpretation in our artform is not the same as sloppy. Sloppy is when the work throws a variety of images and events at the audience and invites them to make any meaning they want from them. Open, on the other

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hand, is not an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for meaning-making. Open means the work has created a world of codes that create access to it, codes that are the result of strong gravities. These codes are not closed in their meaning systems, they are not set in a fixed or limiting way, so each audience member may make their own meaning within their embrace. And all these individual moments of meaning-making are triggered by the same moments of the work. This combination of guided openness creates plays like Waiting for Godot, or Robert Wilson’s body of work. It is not that there is no “answer” at the end of an open work of timebound art. It is instead the questions that the audience asks about the answer that makes for its openness.

How Meaning Is Made or Waylaid Movies and plays are most vulnerable to misinterpretation during their final convergence. This is the moment when the audience “gets” or doesn’t get the entire work, so the costs associated with controlling the shape of the way the audience makes meaning at this moment are nothing compared to the cost of losing them. This is because this is when the trigger is pulled and the bullet has to hit not a single bull’s-eye but the five hundred bull’s-eyes it has painted on and in every audience member. It is easier to hit five hundred bull’s-eyes if they are the same—which is why works with a simple setup-story-machinery have more reliable payoffs. In popular movies and plays, the target in each audience member is more or less identical to the one inside the audience member sitting beside them. In more open works, when the trigger is pulled at the end, the same bullet has to hit one or two or five hundred different bull’s-eyes—and the bullet may miss the target in some percentage of the audience completely. It is an obvious truism that all targets are not created equal. And most importantly for this discussion, it is important to realize that the nature of some targets makes them easier to hit than others. Why do you think broad comedy is called broad? Because the target is so wide it is almost impossible to miss. These types of plays and films will have solid and reliable perception shifts, although the cliché “A mile wide and an inch deep” may apply here. Why is melodrama a lower life form? Because a melodrama is “all target.” But the ultimate trick shot is the one that hits the head and heart at the same time. That doesn’t happen in broad comedy or melodrama.

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Because when something hits the head and heart at the same time, that’s poetry. We accept that our plays are vulnerable to misinterpretation. This is their wonder and their glory and their potential Waterloo. The ability of film to control tone makes a movie much less susceptible to misinterpretation, but with that safeguard comes a hefty price tag: the loss of the witness, the primacy of the testimony of live theatre.

Mysteries Are Almost All Writers’ Favorite Genre for a Reason House was one of my favorite TV shows, and not just because House insists that everybody lies, and lies are doubleness, and you know what a sucker for doubleness I am, but because the end of the show always had a perception shift. House, created by David Shore, looks like a medical show, but in reality, it’s a mystery show. The doctor’s name, House, is a riff on Sherlock Holmes. The formula for virtually every episode is that we find out that we, and everybody, including House, until minute forty-nine on the clock, have all been looking at the problem in the wrong way. Suddenly, House has a Eureka moment that allows him to see it correctly. It is incredibly satisfying every time, but only because we’ve been looking at it the wrong way so intensely and entertainingly. The Samuel Johnson effect—that nothing concentrates the mind so much as the realization that you’ve been wrong—roars back to life. The realization ripples through characters and audience members alike. Everyone has the exact same perception shift. The patient lives or dies on the strength of the resulting new way of seeing the killer bacterium or toxic substance or deadly mother-in-law that the perception shift allows us all to see clearly, at last. When the final piece of a murder or medical mystery falls into place, it reassures us on an almost cosmic level. In a sense, all plays and films are mysteries. We seek, we look, we are busily making meaning, we discover answers to questions we know we are asking and answers to questions that we only discover, when they are answered, that we have been asking all along. I think that’s a big part of what a mystery is, and how a great timebound work of art works— that the final moments answer something bigger than we knew was even being asked.

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The Long Arc When we talk about the arc of a work of art, we generally mean the path the entire piece takes. Something happens at the start, keeps happening in the middle, and happens in the end. Beginning, middle, end. But even though the arc of a work is often referred to in a singular or monolithic way, generally a work is made of a series of arcs. We also use the phrases “story arc” or “character arc” with similar inexactness. Additionally, there are arcs that live in the structural aspects of a work that build and blossom and resolve. These are the scaffoldings of rhymes and doublenesses and other patterns that accumulate and create the self-similarity in a work that shapes the gaze of the audience. We don’t have names for these kinds of arcs, we just enjoy the formal satisfactions they provide and the rigor that any wellorganized part of a work creates. Is talking about arc another way of talking about a work’s clock? Somewhat. An arc lives in time and happens over a period of it, and there is a correspondence between short clocks and short arcs, long clocks and long arcs. Long clocks aren’t “made” out of short clocks, but short clocks are generally a vital part of them. In the same way, short arcs are often part of what supports and matters in longer arcs—but some works make use of fewer short clocks and arcs than others, with results that differ accordingly. Some works hold all the energy generated by the dramatic forces of a play to a tight, firmly directed sequence—the long arc. Other works ripple and pop along with arc after arc, with multiple setups and payoffs—the short arc. The length of a work’s arcs is often a matter of the writer’s voice or style—some writers love the energy that comes from the explosive nature of constant short arcs, others consistently build works that are structured inside long arcs without much in the way of short arcs at all. It is easy to say that a long arc is better than a short one. I have said it multiple times and always thought that I was right. It’s true that I am constantly confused when someone sets up something and then pays it off immediately, because it seems a waste—why build a machine that can carry weight and then toss it away after one time like single-use plastic? And the long arcs, because they tend to organize more of the work of art, feel more important. Long arcs generally carry things that the work of art values and teaches us to value, so I tend to privilege them more. The longer you can skip a stone, the more attention the viewer will give each skip, and the greater pleasure they will receive from it.

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Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a play about workers at a failing factory, is a powerful example of the way a long arc creates a slow burning sense of anticipation inside its audience that does not compete with or become diluted by the climaxes of smaller arcs. While the play is filled with situations that we might expect will result in large dramatic reveals and confrontations, Morisseau uses none of her characters’ desires and needs to create any resolutions along the way. She lets the play’s energy collect around a single question: what will happen to these workers when the factory closes? Inside that question there are issues of equality, compassion, greed, and fairness. The play’s long arc keeps the audiences’ attention on its center, and Skeleton Crew never diffuses the stakes. Instead it finds ways to ask the audience to invest in its central question in deeper, bigger ways. The play invites us into the breakroom at a factory where three workers air their grievances and share their lives. Rumors are flying that the factory is about to close and that someone is stealing from the parts of the factory that have already been shut down. They don’t feel that their foreman Reggie, who used to be one of them, is fighting hard enough for their wages, benefits, and protection. The veteran of the three workers, Faye, has lost her home because of her gambling addiction and is secretly living in the breakroom. If she’s caught sleeping there, she’ll be fired. Shanita, a much younger worker, is pregnant. She needs this job to support herself and her child. Dez, also a younger worker, plans to open an auto repair shop when the plant shuts down. He has a serious and unrequited crush on Shanita. With every discovery that we make about these characters, a choice that they must make comes into focus, with its benefits and costs. Reggie, who is the son of Faye’s deceased partner, tells her that the plant is closing soon but begs her not to disclose this or rally the workers about it yet. Faye is the union rep and has responsibilities to her fellow workers, but it’s also vitally important to her that Reggie’s job is secure. Meanwhile, Shanita has been offered a job at a copy shop—it would be the security she needs, but she doesn’t want to take a job making copies when she has one making cars. Faye is torn—can Reggie guarantee that Shanita will be given a spot at another factory or should she tell her to take the copy shop job? And Dez—we are meant to suspect that he is doing the stealing. He’s not, but he needs to stay on the job to save enough money to start his auto repair shop. An additional complication is that Dez is a problem employee, and if Reggie tries to keep him on at the factory, he is really putting his job, his new home, his family’s security at risk. We want him

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to fight for Shanita and Dez, but we also want him to keep the life he’s fought for and won. In the same way that economic necessity forces choices large and small in an unrelenting stream in the lives of people without resources, the play lets the gravitational pull of need and conflicting outcomes build and build, with no release. This is a demonstration of how powerful a long arc can be when nothing happens in small arcs to release or resolve its urgency. The central question—what will happen to these people—is asked consistently in every interaction we see, and we find out, step by step, how complicated the answer turns out to be. Faye has been working at the plant for twenty-nine years. She needs to stay till she hits the thirty-year mark in order to get substantially better benefits when the plant closes. If she calls a strike for the workers to rally or demands that they are given better severance packages and treated fairly, she could get fired—anything that she might do for others puts the rest of her life at risk. She’s no longer young, her gambling addiction cost her her house, she’s recovering from breast cancer, she’s alone after the death of her partner—all she has is this job and her pension. But a hero always has to make a sacrifice. Faye cannot have both her pension and protect those in her care, her pension and her faith in what matters. At the end of the play, Reggie tells her that he fought for both Shanita and Dez and won, but he was told to fire Faye so they won’t have to pay her thirty-year pension. He couldn’t control himself and almost hit his superior. He knows he has lost his job. But he is not sorry. He did what was right, and he will accept the consequences. He will call his wife and tell her their life is about to change. But Faye will not allow it. She tells him to go back to his superior and tell him that he talked her into leaving. Surely this will redeem Reggie in the man’s eyes, and his job will be secure. Reggie resists, but Faye is unmovable. She is going to quit to save him. He asks her for the second time to come and live at his house, and this time, Faye says yes. All that we care about rises up to make this moment. Two heroes have stepped up and claimed the moral ground, regardless of the cost; they have claimed their right to love another person and sacrifice for them. The long arc that stretches from the first moments of this play to its end has given us the luxury of slowly building our desire for justice, without the shelter of small victories or the charge of explosive defeats along the way. The play’s convergence gathers up the entire play.

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A Small Play to Fill Us with Wonder New Approaches to Narrative by Steve Moore Steve Moore’s play has one of the loveliest perception shifts I’ve ever seen. I hope that as you experience it, it will move forward your understanding of how our artform works. The play’s final perception shift is gorgeous, moving, visual, and transforms the entire play. The play has clear structured nextness, with a growing understanding that prepares us for, but doesn’t undermine, its convergence. It is weight-bearing and light at the same time.

New Approaches to Narrative By Steve Moore Center stage is a table and chair. On the table is a pen. To the right of the table is a stack of yellow legal pads and green composition notebooks, alternating yellow, green, yellow, green… On the left, downstage corner of the table is a royal blue tea kettle. On the right corner is a desk lamp with a red lightbulb and no lampshade. The cord of the lamp trails away upstage into darkness. To the left of the table, a small wire trash can, nearly full of old composition notebooks and legal pads, all with writing on them—as well as crumpled up pages from each. They’re in a jumble of green and yellow. Stage right, a clear plastic storage bin. Inside are various objects, all of them royal blue and half-visible to the audience: socks, blanket, comb, oven mitt, tutu, stuffed elephant, etc. Lights up. A man dressed in gray pajamas enters carrying a royal blue beret. He takes the kettle from the table, drops the beret into the same spot on the table, and puts the kettle into the storage bin. He addresses the audience.

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This is a story that’s been hard to get right. There’ve been lots of versions, lots of drafts. He gestures to the trash can. He takes one of the yellow legal pads from the trash can, flips through it a moment.

The most recent version was a story of three people tiny enough to live in a tea kettle who don’t know they live in a tea kettle—until Fate floods the house and boils one of them alive. He drops the legal pad back into the trash can with the others.

Nothing wrong with it, but the whole process was still in its early days, still feeling its way forward over this strange terrain. The goal for the story was to answer the question: What is it really like? Not: What is a poetic version of it? But: What is it really like when actual people go through something like grief. That didn’t mean the story couldn’t be outlandish. It could happen on Mars with red angels eating bowls of dead bees, but whatever it was, whatever happened, it had to feel true—true to an encounter with an annihilating loss. That’s where the Editor came in. He gestures to the lamp on the table.

It would let me know if anything I wrote wasn’t true to that feeling, if what I wrote wasn’t an answer to the question: What is it really like? Its job was to keep me honest. He sits down, takes a green composition notebook off the top of the stack, opens it to the first page, and begins to write.

Let’s say it begins with two chimpanzees in a cheap hotel, wearing blue berets, watching Nick at Night, and drinking their way through a fifth of fortified wine. The red light comes on for a moment. He looks at it and scratches something out.

I get rid of the fortified wine. The red light comes on again for a moment. He makes a change.

I change Nick at Night to CNN.

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The red light comes on again for a moment. He makes another change.

I change the chimps to human children with tattoos of their own tumors. The red light comes on again for a moment.

I… He’s about to make another edit, but the light simply comes on again and stays on this time. He looks at the bulb as he tears the page out, crumples the paper, and throws it into the trash can. The light goes out. He thinks for a moment and starts again.

Let’s say it begins with a couple—a husband and wife—who wake up to find a strange suitcase at the foot of their bed. He looks at the light, which has not come on. He continues, warily, checking for the lamp’s approval every so often.

Let’s say the suitcase has materialized there from thin air sometime in the middle of night, not by magic—or not exactly. The husband and wife—along with the rest of humanity—live under the watchful eye of a global artificial super-intelligence, which humankind has given a nickname. They call it “The Mind”. Whatever we assumed that super AI would look like when it finally emerged, this isn’t it. Maybe we thought it would never lose at Scrabble. Instead, the Mind solves every problem in the world: cancer, climate change, folding fitted sheets. It’s so intelligent and powerful that it’s now to the humans as the humans are to hamsters, and half the things it does look to us like magic—including conjuring a suitcase at the foot of someone’s bed in the middle of the night. In this case, a suitcase full of children’s clothes. Red light for a moment.

Full of … photographs. Red light.

Full of … toy elephants. Red light.

Full of … sand.

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Red light.

Full of … sssolace. No light.

A suitcase full of solace. … Solace … Solace. (Trying to get used to the word.) … All right. A suitcase full of solace in the middle of the night. He gets up from the desk and paces the stage.

I said its job was to keep me honest, but this wasn’t going to be the kind of honesty I had in mind. There’s simple honesty and complicated honesty—and I was looking forward to the simple version. I was hoping for one of those stories that’s made out of simple, clear moments that add up at the end to a simple, clear feeling: Singing in the Rain or The Sound of Music or Invasion of the Body Snatchers—not one of these Frenchy stories with a bunch of ambitious ambiguity. What did it even mean for them to get a suitcase of solace? It depended. It depended on what each of them thought it meant to be comforted, consoled, repaired, forgiven … And that would turn out to have consequences for the whole story. It meant the Editor was dictating the architecture. Worse than that, it meant the Editor was experimenting with some new approach to narrative that I’d be stuck scrambling to understand. For instance, I’d slowly realize as the story went on from here that although we’d still end up with the typical three acts—act 1, act 2, act 3—each of them would turn out to be something very specific and peculiar. There would be Divergence, Duality, and Decision. The first act was Divergence. He sits down again.

The suitcase arrives. It has “Solace” written on the side in big perfect cursive—and in parentheses “Comfort”- slash – “Consolation”. The wife doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t trust the Mind, meaning she doesn’t trust the Mind to be complex. Obviously, it’s smart. But it tends to be binary. To the Mind, everything is on or off, true or false, right or wrong. He glances at the light. It stays off and he carries on.

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Anyway, the suitcase arrives and before the husband realizes that the wife doesn’t want it, he opens it and a thousand eerie, high-pitched sounds come out of it, like birdsong on fast forward. He closes his eyes as he continues …

As they go into the ears of the couple, each sound erases a regret or a doubt or a grudge. Some of the sounds foster gratitude. Some loosen the clench that sometimes goes with grief. Red light comes on. He senses it through his closed eyes and, with his eyes still closed, he holds out a hand to try to block the light. He carries on without a pause.

The couple can feel themselves opening to the world again. He opens his eyes and speaks the last line directly to the light.

Each of them takes a deep breath—probably the first deep breath since the funeral. It stays on. He exhales then slowly scratches out a whole paragraph worth of text. The lights go off at last: It’s satisfied.

The suitcase arrives—he doesn’t open it—they talk it over. The wife doesn’t want to open it but the husband does. Red light.

No, the husband does … I’m pretty sure. Red light. A sigh and he hesitates. The red light again. He scratches out, and starts again.

It arrives and they talk it over. The wife doesn’t want to open the suitcase. He doesn’t want to open it either, apparently, but he’s less sure. He’s curious. No red light. He stands up as he gestures to the lamp.

There. That’s what felt so strange. The Editor didn’t want the typical kind of conflict. It didn’t want a rift or an upheaval. It wanted this other thing, this feeling of Divergence. Something small. Something the couple might actually survive … in other words, even inside of the divergence, the Editor wanted to bind the two of them together: by their shared resistance

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to the strange suitcase temptation. Oddly, they’re even bound together by things that the solace might have spared them from feeling at all. For example, they’re bound together by the sound of an ice cream truck passing through  the neighborhood. They’re bound together by the feeling of weightlessness that comes with finding an unopened box of Cheerios. He sits back down and writes.

The husband and wife had had a daughter who just died at the age of six after a long illness and they’re ripped to bits by grief. They’ve stopped seeing their friends and family. They’re both writers, and they try to write but everything comes out grey or angry. They have a quote on their fridge that says, “What others learn from living in the world, writers learn from writing.” Maybe, but at the moment they’re barely doing either one. They’re in bed when the suitcase arrives in the middle of the night but they would have been in bed regardless. They hardly leave it. They run out of coffee and then tea, and now take turns just boiling water that they sip while staring into space. It feels like grief is hitting them each on the head with a mallet. The husband looks at the unopened suitcase sitting in the corner of the bedroom and starts to think of what’s inside as a kind of hard hat. He imagines still feeling the blows of the mallet through the hard hat, but would it be so wrong, he wonders, to feel them a little less? The wife thinks about the suitcase, too. She thinks: If the all-powerful Mind can deliver this automatic relief, why didn’t it simply save their daughter when it had the chance? A beat. He stands up.

That was the end of act one. The end of Divergence. He gestures to the lamp.

I’d gone a while without an interruption and I remember thinking I understood now what it wanted: Bringing the couple together before edging them apart was just the first step. That wasn’t enough. What it really wanted was to put the couple slowly into separate worlds. If Divergence was act one, act two was Duality. Duality meant that one divergence followed another and for each of them, one half of the divergence went with one world—while the other half of the divergence went with another world. In our case, the closed suitcase goes with a world

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of grief while an open suitcase goes with a world of solace. Grief and solace. But there were more to come: Creepy hospitals and taking off your blue beret—and ultimately the wife herself—will go with the world of grief, while riding on the ferris wheel and leaving on your blue beret—and the husband himself—will go with the world of solace. Grief and solace. Other stories have other dualities. Connecticut and King Arthur’s Court. Light starts blinking but he carries on without a pause.

Kansas and Oz. A world of justice and a world of mercy. The world before some big event and the world after it. Finally acknowledging the light, and with the same left-and-right gestures he used to indicate the dualities …

This meant “Shut up” and “Get back to work.” He sits down and the light stops pulsing. He takes up the pen and writes.

To be rid of the suitcase without really being rid of it, they agree to leave it in the corner of the bedroom and spend the last of their savings on a trip to Paris. Without intending to, they end up at places their daughter would have loved—the Eiffel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle to see the stained glass, the Museum of Natural History to see the pterodactyl eggs. They listen to Katy Perry songs and ride the ferris wheel in the Place de la Concorde. But then it’s foggy and cold, and they drink. When it’s sunny again, they fight. The day after the fight, it’s the daughter’s birthday so they take a walk at night but keep encountering creepy hospitals. The next day, the wife sits in a park and stares at the children. The husband sits at a distance and stares at his shattered wife. All the while of course, the Mind is watching them. It’s programmed to be benevolent and seeing us suffer and struggle makes it search for ways to cure us of our unhappiness. The couple happens to be in Paris, when the Mind bans smoking and half the Parisians go on strike. Then the Mind bans impoliteness and they set fire to their own cars. So the Mind changes its mind, as it often does. It runs experiments. Sometimes they succeed. More often they fail. It has no ego. When an experiment fails, it simply sends a note to everyone involved that just says: “Never mind”—and moves on to something else. It does wonder sometimes, though, whether it’s been asked to help a species that can’t be helped. If you want the Mind’s opinion, the real

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problem is that humans are addicted to existence. After all, the only real happiness comes from wisdom. And wisdom comes from an awareness of impermanence. We’re impermanent; the people we love are impermanent; and death is our instructor. The Mind concludes that the path to human happiness, the way to break this addiction to existence, is by the delicate deployment of grief. It’s still early days in that experiment and for now the Mind is keeping it a secret. If people learned what it had done, it’s aware there would be questions—especially from the parents. He takes up the blue beret from the table.

One afternoon, the wife buys a blue beret. She puts it on and feels better for a day … Red light.

For … an afternoon. Red light.

For … an hour? Red light.

For … ten minutes? No light.

The wife feels better for ten minutes, then she takes it off. He tosses the beret down onto the table again.

The night before leaving Paris, they go to see an old French film where a boy named Antoine seems to spend the whole film running, mostly running away. He runs through the streets of Paris. He steals and runs to keep from getting caught. He runs away from his school. He runs away from his family. At the start of the movie, he’s almost happy. By the end, his situation is miserable—but it all happens so slowly that you barely notice. In act one, Divergence creates a crack. In act two, Duality drives a wedge. Eventually, the two worlds insist on independence, and they separate, often in silence. And into that silence comes the third and final act: Decision.

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The husband and wife know they need to decide what to do with the suitcase that’s still sitting unopened in the corner of their bedroom … They thought they would have made up their minds by now. They haven’t—and it’s time to fly home. It’s a long flight but they barely talk. They land, go through customs, and wait for their bags—in silence. They take a taxi and come into the quiet house at midnight. They drop their bags in the living room, and for some reason, they decide to light a candle in the kitchen instead of turning on the lights. One of them opens the Cheerios and pours the whole box into a metal mixing bowl. They find two spoons. There’s no milk. And then they talk. They talk at the kitchen table for two hours about shame, guilt, confusion, blame. He thought she insisted too long on eastern medicine when he was sure they should already be at MD Anderson. She thought he cried too often in front of their daughter, which forced the daughter to comfort him. It also forced the daughter to know that she would die. They each confess to a loneliness that feels like being eaten from the inside by a pterodactyl. The red light comes on. In the air in front of him, he scratches out what he’s written.

… that feels like falling down a chasm into a glacier of melting blood. The red light comes on. Again, he scratches out what he’s written.

… that feels like a surgery with a steak knife. Ugh. The red light comes on. He vigorously scratches out what he’s written.

… that feels like … that feels just … very … very sad. No light. He carries on.

The Cheerios are gone and they decide they’ll open up the suitcase after all. Red light. If possible, it’s brighter than ever. Then, speaking to the light itself.

Wait. Just wait. After a moment, the red light goes out.

They carry the candle from the kitchen to the bedroom. They look in the corner. And find that the suitcase is gone.

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There’s a note on the nightstand. It’s written in the Mind’s perfect cursive and just says, “Never mind.” Leaving the pen on the table, he picks up the green composition notebook he’s been writing in and puts it into the trash can.

“The 400 Blows” was François Truffaut’s first film, a movie in black and white about lost innocence and dashed hopes. It’s one of the Frenchiest stories you can imagine, complicated honesty from beginning to end. In the final scene, Antoine is still running. He escapes his reform school and runs until he reaches the ocean. The duality of the film has been big feelings versus hard reality, and here is the ocean. And it’s both. Decision was never about which side of the duality would win. It was about deciding to see the world as it really is, with its ridiculous rising and falling, and its strange mathematics of only addition: right plus wrong plus before plus after plus justice plus mercy plus mercy plus mercy. The husband and wife decide to take a shower together. They kiss in the shower. They put on pajamas and get into bed. In the morning, they start again. They boil water, drink it, boil more. They decide to string the pieces of the story end to end—not because they have a need to find an answer, but because they have a need to look for one. It’s all they know to do. It’s who they are. Upstage, a woman comes into view—his wife—dressed in her own gray pajamas. She’s holding a royal blue candle and a big red button that’s attached to the long lamp cord. He walks to her. They hug. She hands him the button on the cord. He exits, into the darkness upstage, straightening the cord as he goes. The wife prepares for her turn: She goes to the table, picks up the beret, puts the candle where the beret had been. She puts the beret into the box with the kettle and toys. She goes back to the table, takes a new yellow legal pad from the top of the stack, sits down, takes up the pen, and writes.

Wife—Let’s say it begins … with a single lighted candle … on the ocean floor. She turns to look at the lamp. Lights crash to black. End of play.

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Structure Is Just What Happens in the End We are always at the end of a play or film, we just don’t know it. This is one of the things that is at the heart of a work’s timebound nature. A moment of prepared and then expanding understanding is something we can never tire of.

Writing Exercise: Adapt the Convergence of a Song Spend some time listening carefully to music—songs, symphonies, solos. Pay close attention and try to identify the convergence—the moment it all comes together—and how it works, what creates it, what its structure is. Tone, timbre, repeating motifs, melody, which instruments do what—all of these things are part of the way that a climax/convergence is created in music. Some songs come together in their lyrics, some in melody, some in sheer volume, some in a progression that is tracked through theme and variation. After you’ve identified the music’s structure, use it as the structure for a short play. You can adapt all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or a movement from it, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” You just have to extract the pattern you find in the music and use it as the organizing principle. It’s easier to use a piece without lyrics for this exercise, although if you’re using a piece with them, you can use the voices but not the meaning of the words they are singing. The exercise asks you to take the fundamentals of how convergence is structured in our work and use it as a filter when you attempt to identify the structure in musical work. Then take that music’s structure and turn it into a short play. Part of the point of this exercise is to make you more adept and sensitive to seeing pattern everywhere, to make it easy to find the breadcrumbs and blaze marks and landmarks that lead us from the start of the journey to its destination, the structures that make us feel as if we had known the way all along.

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Hope Is at the Heart of Everything in Our Artform The force that pulls us forward—despite our sense of right and wrong in Beauty Queen, against our foreknowledge of the outcome in both Wit and Baltimore Waltz, in spite of our knowledge of the Titanic’s fate—is our hope. That’s what makes us inhabit and cling to and believe in the what if. With most works, the “dramatic tension” may build and fall, build and fall. We will follow some things and let other things fall away. When things go well for characters we care about, our hope builds. When things go badly for characters we care about, our hope builds. Our hope moves independently from all the other forces generated by a work of art. Or rather, it is generated by them but works beyond their grasp. The journey we take is a Möbius strip. Nothing is a straight climb in degree and intensity but this: the trajectory of our hope. Our hope builds no matter what happens. Hope is the constant, the essence of all that happens to us in a timebound work of art. Even works that are all about destroying its characters’ hopes are still using the deep gravitational pull of the audience’s hope to draw them forward. When Pandora opened the box in her famous, eternal myth, she let all manner of sorrow and pain out into the world. Sickness, famine, death—all these evils escaped to torment us. Only one creature remained trapped in the box when Pandora, too late, slammed the lid shut. A small creature that huddled in the corner—a thing called Hope. At least, it is called hope in some translations. In some translations, it is called Deceptive Expectation, or Expectation of Bad. In these translations, it is an evil, an evil just as dangerous to humankind as sickness or famine. Additionally, hope is trapped in the box—does this mean that hope is being preserved for us, or that it is being withheld from us? Sometimes plays and films use our hope against us—in Beauty Queen, our hope makes us betray our best selves and excuse the fact that Maureen has killed her mother. Our hope can trick us into seeing things in ways that would shock or sadden us if we were not so deeply under its spell, if the choices of characters were not disguised by our devotion to this almost sacred emotion. Hope is the great machine of our artform. It makes all things in our writing possible on all scales. It is the currency that we use to trade, and

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often the ultimate cargo as well. It is the goal, the good we reach for and how we do the reaching. It is difficult to identify a play or film that does not have hope as its primary engine—I’ve tried to do so; I have not succeeded. There are plays and films where the characters have no real hope, but that does not limit the hope that grows in the audience. In fact, it may be a part, often, of an inverse relationship—the less hope on stage, the more hope across the footlights. Here is the most important thing we must always remember: even if no one in a play or film hopes, the audience must. There is no caring without hope, no wanting to know what happens next without it. There is no nextness without hope, whether it is for the largest things in life or the very smallest. The word that appears most often in Long Day’s Journey is hope: hope, hopeless, hopeful, hopefully. It appears sixty-four times. When a work of art generates hope in its audience, it can manipulate them without resistance—we have no defenses to our hope, we are completely vulnerable in the face of it. “Where there is hope, there is life.” This is a cliché that tells a deeper truth: it is the participation that we make in hope, both our hope for the characters and our investment in their hopes, that brings us back to Oedipus again and again to participate in the ritual journey of a man whose fate we already know by heart. My sister will always hope that the merchant of Venice will choose money over a pound of flesh. Teenage girls will watch Titanic for the twentieth time and hope that Jack will find another door to use for himself, or a larger door, or that he will try to fit on the door with Rose, because, after all, there is clearly enough room. Our hope is the place where everything that matters in a work matters in a way that makes us believe we can just, possibly, maybe, a little bit be able to change what happens with the power of our longing for it. We know better, but we keep hoping anyway, because that’s the way hope works. A large part of Peter Pan’s enduring appeal in the theatre is the moment when Tinkerbell’s life depends on the children in the audience clapping and chanting “I do believe in fairies.” While belief is not quite the same as hope, they are certainly parts of each other. The Tinkerbell effect is now a term used in the social sciences to describe the idea that enough belief in something will cause it to happen. We want to believe hope has the power to change our own lives, so why shouldn’t it have the power to change what happens in the imaginary worlds we watch on stage and screen? We all hope that what Andy writes Red at the end of The Shawshank Redemption is true: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”3

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Hope, at its purest, is a plot device, because it is our hope, not the characters’. If I may repeat something that I said in “Choice and Consequence”: The fact is that the more we hope about everything, the greater our investment is in the next moment. This is the definition of nextness. There is no greater forward strategy than hope. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all forward strategies are made out of hope. The audience’s hope makes them go forward.

Hope is also why works that function with a final reveal rather than a choice at convergence tend to have less repeatability. A reveal of something that has happened in the past does not happen in front of us, and so there is no way to hope, there is never that instant when the what if can come fully into play.

Exercise: Tracking Hope Track your hopes—not the characters’—as you read a play or watch a film. Example: If you’re watching Moonlight, you would write down “I hope Little’s mother stops doing drugs. I hope Juan takes care of Little. I hope Little isn’t beat up by those other boys.” Now, it’s true that all the characters we care about in the film also hope for these things, and their hopes are especially easy for us to ride on. We know that hope is the best forward strategy there is, because as long as the audience hopes, they will keep moving forward. So please talk about your hope, how it is manipulated/used/structured. Works of timebound art shape our hope and often surprise us in that shaping.

Sometimes a work is so beautifully imagined and executed that it allows for radically different hopes to exist in different audience members. It is true that in some of our best works, there are as many different plays or films happening in the house as there are members of the audience, but it is not often that it is equally successful in all its different “versions.” I believe that A Streetcar Named Desire is an example of one that is. A student once told me that as an angry high-school student reading the play, he wanted Blanche to be driven out immediately so that Stanley and

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Stella could live happily ever after. Reading it now, he saw it very differently. He hoped that Blanche’s lies would somehow be believed by the others, and that she would be allowed to stay in the quiet dignity of the illusions that she chose to live by. In high school, he had piggybacked on Stanley and Stella’s hopes, and his experience was a satisfying reading of the play, especially since the play’s early strategy wants us to sympathize with Stella and Stanley and see Blanche as an intruder, a destroyer of an innocent, voluptuous marriage. Ultimately, the play will make most of us see the world as it truly is, who the destroyer is. My student’s hopes remained with Stella and Stanley till the end of the play the first time he read it. But he saw a radically different Streetcar when he read the play four years later. It may be possible to say that all hope that is generated in the audience, even though it is generated by the story, is part of the plot. It is important that we see hope as something we can use to control the quality and speed and focus of forward-reaching impulses in the audience. In the same way that when we talk about a play being character-driven, we are actually talking about how it is choice-driven, when we talk about action or event, we are really talking about hope. We only pay attention to things if we want or don’t want them to happen. Events mean very little to us outside of the context of our hope. The nature of our hope is the strongest force in the construction of any work that we see. It shapes our gaze, values some things over others, and creates the rules for understanding what happens and why. Inside the audience’s hope is the ultimate place where the play is made. Hope is the Trojan Horse we construct inside ourselves, using the blueprint that the play or film provides, step by vulnerable step. And then it opens up inside us and so often destroys us. We shouldn’t ever forget that hope and fear are essentially the same thing. The ending that you already know is inescapable. When you watch a play or movie that you have seen before that you know ends badly, you know that what you are hoping for is impossible. All those possible endings that you are imagining, called into being by your hope, your faith, your belief that this time good will win and evil will wither, your conviction that young love will defy the laws of reality and survive all odds—all the what ifs, all the if only’s, all the should be’s and could be’s—you know that all of them are escape routes that will always dead end. It doesn’t stop you wanting them.

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All true stories end in death. Hemingway said it, but you don’t need Hemingway to tell you. You know it, but you still don’t want to believe it. Knowing and believing are two different things. The story ends, but the plot—which is, in the end made out of your hope as much as it is made out of anything—never ends. It keeps on.

Once Again: The Duck Rabbit Doubleness trains us to hold two contrasting or different things at once, which prepares us for understanding the workings of perception shifts. Artistic doubleness is one of the most precise and profound aspects of any artform—the way a thing can be more than one thing at once. There are many strategies that can create a perception shift. And there are perception shifts of all sizes and significance. There is no one way, no better way. Every magic act creates itself in the way it dazzles us. The one truth about perception shifts? We long for them because of the insight they generate when we have one. Okkie Brownstein says that “an essential element of a prospective strategy is the creation by a play of our desire to understand something, to achieve secret knowledge or to experience a transforming insight into a fundamental issue of human life.”4

Illustration 7.1  Once again: The duck rabbit. Source: Robert Faires

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When we look at the duck rabbit, we flicker back and forth between seeing the duck then the rabbit then the duck, and there are split instants when we almost see them both at the same time. We run from one meaning to the other and create new territory in the middle. Each time we see the duck or the rabbit we have a quick, tiny perception shift. I sometimes think that a perception shift comforts us by reinforcing our belief that our lives have pattern, and order, and meaning, and even though it is just beyond our comprehension, the clues and signposts for understanding it have been there, all along. I believe we go to the theatre because we long for meaning and a world that makes sense. We long for proof that the nature of the universe is not a secret that it is being hidden from us but is instead a mystery, not hidden from us but waiting to be understood. It is a mystery we can solve, if only we pay the right attention.

The Way We Make Sense of the World Is Who We Are During the Covid-19 quarantine in May 2020, Margaret Lyons, writing in the New York Times, recommended watching ER, even if you’d already seen it. She praised it for all the things true of any quality TV series. But then she said, “Second, and more relevant for our present circumstances, it’s about people who are trying. And that is the big focus right now—to try. To affirm people’s dignity and your own; to help when you can and rest when you must; to learn and then do better. The prize is a life you can be proud of and a community to be part of.”5 When we go to the theatre or watch a movie, we participate in the creation of a world. A perception shift makes us see that we created a flawed way to understand that world, that we have put all our eggs in an unreliable basket. Maybe it’s not even a basket at all but a shredder. Maybe those eggs aren’t even eggs. And in the instant we lose our certainty about those eggs and that basket, we are open to seeing that the way we arrive at all our feelings could also, possibly, maybe, be flawed as well. This insight doesn’t last long. When we are confronted with a real work of art, we realize we don’t think what we thought we did. We are forced—for a moment, for two—to question our old beliefs and understandings, we are open to new ways of both. This is as close as most of us ever get to being changed. We crave insight because it seems

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to make us new. A perception shift signals that there is a truer reality under the reality that we are experiencing. The perception shift gives us access to it. We were blind, but now we see. That flickering instant when we consider that we are as blind to the truth of our own lives as we are to the truths on stage or screen is a moment that can help us understand that there are other ways to see the world and ourselves in it. Plays and movies offer their audience a way to access places and feelings inside them—their fears and loves and angers. The audience waits to know one thing only: how does my existence matter? It is not our job to show the audience how to see anything in particular differently, but to show them how to see any thing differently. The audience does not come to find out about Lear. They come to find out about themselves. They come for meaning. For insight. The audience does not come to the theatre for anything they can get anywhere else. They come to be a congregation and all that that entails. They come to bring the dreams and disappointments of their lives up to the surface, to hold what living is for them up for the work to engage with, and for the work to fill up those pieces of their lives. The audience comes to bear witness to their own struggle to be braver or kinder or better in the guise of the struggle of the characters before them and be refreshed by a moment inside the twinned time of the spectacle, and be remade in their longings and be reunited with their struggle. They want to be changed. They want to sit down in the dark of the theatre and be a slightly different collection of things when they stand up again. They long to be able to say, at the moment of convergence: now I see. And to be made stronger in this moment, in the truth they receive.

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Acknowledgments

It’s been a joy writing this book, and every step along the way I was surrounded by theatremakers and family members and friends who encouraged and supported me. I was blessed with two remarkable first readers—Steve Moore and Katie Pearl. They read the book as it evolved and gave me complex notes that drilled down into the heart of the work that expanded and focused my gaze. Other generous readers were Suzan Zeder, Lee Rosengard (my ever-supportive brother-in-law), Julia Kramer, Jim Magnuson, Kim Marra, Meredith Alexander, and Helen Clement. I am grateful to Todd London, Emily Morse, and Jeremy Cohen for their wisdom and support, and Jean Thomson Black for her generous guidance. I was also lucky in the many young writers who have worked as my assistants: Sam Mayer, Benny Goldmintz, Alex Hovet, Bronwyn Edwards, Lydia Duff, and Megan Tabaque made contributions that were invaluable. The assistant who worked with me the longest, who has gone the distance and made all the difference, is Jeremy Geragotelis. As we worked together over five years, he became my editor, responding to what I had written and shaping so much of the final configuration and essence of the book. He was exquisitely sensitive to the choices involved, he was tireless and brilliant. He was the perfect audience for a book about the audience. For the bulk of our time, he was paid by a faculty grant from Bennington College, for which I am very grateful. This book would be very different if I had not taught the extraordinary playwrights, poets, fiction writers, and screenwriters in the MFA program that is the Michener Center for Writers (MCW) at UT, Austin. I started teaching at the MCW in the mid-1990s when the generous, wise, and kind David Mark Cohen invited me to teach at UT. The Michener Center was a kind of Camelot during that period under the big-hearted leadership of James Magnuson, who had me return regularly for the next twenty-five years. Many of the concepts that I discuss in this book are ones that I developed while teaching there. I also headed up the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at The University of Iowa briefly and returned there to teach on a regular basis for over twenty

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years. I was incredibly lucky to work with the amazing playwrights there, developing my ideas about tragedy and comedy. The writers I taught during my time at Bennington College have always inspired me with the brave plays they wrote, their commitment to the artform, and their generosity to each other. I think most of us remember our first writing teachers, and I hope my Bennington students will remember me as I remember Rose Moss, Frank Bidart, and David Ferry, the writers who made the way clear for me when I was their student and to whom I am grateful to this day. A thank you to David Juaire, long gone but forever in the hearts of so many theatremakers. He was a casting director of extraordinary taste and passion and to walk the theatre district before and after a play with him was to see both the famous and the not so famous actors emerge like magic from the streams of passersby, all drawn to him not so much for the possibility of work but the certainty of his blinding smile and raucous laugh. He loved actors, and among the rules for life in the theatre he taught me, he demanded I learn the importance of showing actors the respect that would make me worthy of the gift of their presence in my work. In the first staged reading of my professional life, he cast Margaret Hamilton, forever typecast as the Wicked Witch of the West, in the role of a character in my play called Aunt Emily, because he said, “For once in her life she should get to play Auntie Em” (Dorothy’s sweet and kind aunt, the polar opposite to the character of the witch). It was not only a delicious irony, but it was also David’s way of sharing something rare with us. We were among the last people on earth who would work on stage with this beautiful soul before her death. My gratitude is never far from my thoughts for Victor D’Altorio, my brilliant, loving, and demanding first reader for over twenty years. He was a director, actor, and much beloved acting teacher in Chicago and Los Angeles. He was annoyed by any lack of precision in our artform. He was annoyed often. No one loved perfection on stage more than he did. Everyone who worked with him found themselves pushed a little closer to understanding how to make it. And a final thank you to Okkie Brownstein, who showed so many of us a way to understand how making something matter happens on stage and why it matters to make it. I hope my deep admiration and respect for him is illuminated here, on every page.

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Notes Preface 1 Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 538.

1 Works of Art Teach Us How to Read Them 1 Oscar Lee Brownstein, Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 9–10. 2 Jackie Sibblies Drury, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic, 2014), 5–6. 3 John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 162. 4 Adam Green, “A Pickpocket’s Tale,” The New Yorker 88 (42) (January 7, 2013), 41.

2 The Perception Shift 1 Oscar Lee Brownstein, Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 6. 2 Ibid., 7. 3 Ibid., 9. 4 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Dramatist Play Services, [1947] 1981), 102. 5 Daniel Simmons, “Selective Attention Test,” YouTube video, 1:21, March 10, 2010. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

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3 Theatre Is a Rhyme for Life 1 I. A. Richards, So Much Nearer: Essays toward a World English (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 118. 2 Harold Pinter, Betrayal (New York: Dramatist Play Services, [1978] 1980), 7. 3 Ibid., 8. 4 Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (New York: Dramatist Play Services, [1996] 1999), 11–12. 5 Ibid., 12–13. 6 Lauren Yee, King of the Yees (New York: Samuel French, 2018), 12. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid., 15–16. 9 Jackie Sibblies Drury, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic, 2014), 59–60. 10 Ibid., 63. 11 Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), 780. 12 Adam Ross, “40 Days and 40 Nights,” New York Times (December 23, 2012), Sunday Book Review, 16. 13 Oscar Lee Brownstein, Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 118.

4 Story and Plot 1 American Film Institute, “Alfred Hitchcock on Mastering Cinematic Tension,” YouTube video, 1:49, December 12, 2008. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPFsuc_M_3E. 2 Oscar Lee Brownstein, Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 66. 3 Ibid., 25. 4 Ibid., 55–6. 5 Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 3. 6 Ibid., 102.

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5 Choice and Consequence 1 E. M. Forster, “The Game of Life,” The Athenaeum: A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts (June 27, 1919), 2. 2 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 143–4. 3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, UK: Claredon, [1738] 1978), 415. 4 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1955] 2002), 105. 5 Tad Friend, “Second Impressions,” The New Yorker, 95 (4) (March 18, 2019).

6 In Retrospect, Inevitable 1 Sam Shepard, Seven Play (New York: Random House, [1981] 2005), 6. 2 Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Dramatist Play Services, 2010), 12. 3 Ibid., 12. 4 Casablanca (1942), [Film] Dir. Michael Curtiz, USA: Warner Bros. 5 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1955] 2002), 19. 6 The Power of the Dog (2021), [Film] Dir. Jane Campion, USA: Netflix. 7 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (New York: Dover, [1899] 1990). 8 Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (London: William Collins, 1983), 406.

7 Convergence 1 Oscar Lee Brownstein, Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 49–50. 2 Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: Norton, 2018), 383. 3 The Shawshank Redemption (1994), [Film] Dir., Frank Darabont, USA: Columbia Pictures. 4 Brownstein, Strategies of Drama, 49. 5 Margaret Lyons, “Extended Journeys for Those with Extra Time,” The New York Times (April 12, 2020), AR 3.

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Harris, J. O., Slave Play, New York: Theatre Communications Group, [2018] 2019. Hemingway, E., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker, New York: Scribener’s, 1981. House, [TV Programme] NBC Universal Television Studios, 2004. Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, UK: Claredon, [1738] 1978. Jacobs-Jenkins, B., An Octoroon, New York: Dramatist Play Services, [2014] 2015 Kirkwood, L., The Children, New York: Theatre Communications Group, [2016] 2017. Lahr, J., Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Lindsay-Abaire, D., Good People, New York: Theatre Communications Group, [2001] 2011. Lindsay-Abaire, D., Rabbit Hole, New York: Dramatist Play Services, 2006. Lyons, M., “Extended Journeys for Those With Extra Time,” The New York Times, April 12, 2020: AR 3–4. McDonagh, M., The Beauty Queen of Leenane, New York: Dramatist Play Services, [1996] 1999. McNally, D., A Long Strange Trip, New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Moonlight, [Film] Dir. Barry Jenkins, USA: A24, 2016. Morisseau, D., Skeleton Crew, New York: Samuel French, [2016] 2017. Nottage, L., Intimate Apparel, New York: Theatre Communications Group, [2003] 2006. Nottage, L., Ruined, New York: Dramatist Play Services, 2010. O’Neill, E., Long Day’s Journey into Night, New Haven: Yale University Press, [1955] 2002. Overboard, [Film] Dir. Gary Marshall, USA: MGM/UA Distribution Company, 1987. Pinter, H., Betrayal, New York: Dramatist Play Services, [1978] 1980. Pirates of the Caribbean, [Film] Dir. Gore Verbinski, USA: Walt Disney Pictures, 2003. The Power of the Dog, [Film] Dir. Jane Campion, USA: Netflix, 2021. Powers, R., The Overstory, New York: Norton, 2018. Richards, I. A., So Much Nearer: Essays Toward a World English, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Ross, A., “40 Days and 40 Nights,” The New York Times, December 23, 2012: Sunday Book Review 16–17. Ruhl, S., The Clean House, New York: Theatre Communications Group, [2004] 2006. The Shawshank Redemption, [Film] Dir., Frank Darabont, USA: Columbia Pictures, 1994.

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Shepard, S., Seven Plays, New York: Random House, [1981] 2005. Simmons, D., “Selective Attention Test,” YouTube video, 1:21, March 10, 2010. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo. The Sixth Sense, [Film] Dir. M. Night Shyamalan, USA: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1999. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Spoto, D., The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, London: William Collins, 1983. Vogel, P., Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays, New York: Theater Communications Group, [1992] 1995. Washburn, A., Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, London: Oberon Books, [2012] 2014. White Christmas, [Film] Dir. Michael Curtiz, USA: Paramount Pictures, 1954. Wilde, O., The Importance of Being Earnest, New York: Dover, [1899] 1990. Williams, T., A Streetcar Named Desire, New York: Dramatist Play Services [1947] 1981. Wilson, A., The Piano Lesson, New York: Plume, [1987] 1990. Woke, [TV Programme] Hulu, 2020. Wright, D., “Lot 13: The Bone Violin,” The Paris Review, Spring 1997: 279. Yee, L., King of the Yees, New York: Samuel French, 2018.

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Index

This index covers terms, works, and persons discussed throughout the book; readers should also consult the table of contents for terms and concepts discussed in specific sections. anticipation 33–4, 76, 95, 146, 163, 181, 187 anticlimax 95–6 Antigone (Sophocles) 110, 117, 118, 126 Arrival (Heisserer, Villeneuve) 2, 72, 172–3 Atlanta (Glover) 77–8 attention xix, 6–7, 12, 17–18, 26, 29, 38, 41, 64, 66, 105, 110, 130, 138, 147–8, 187 and insight 23–5 August Osage County (Letts) 100 Back to the Future (Zemeckis, Gale) 110, 165 Baltimore Waltz (Vogel) 178, 200 Bausch, Pina 88 The Beauty Queen of Leenane (McDonagh) 35, 58–9, 60, 80, 111, 141, 152, 158, 160, 177, 179, 200 Betrayal (Pinter) 2, 56, 60, 84–5, 88–90, 92–3, 121, 152, 155, 172–3 The Birdcage (May, Nichols) 136 Blade Runner (Fancher, Peoples, Scott) 157 The Bone Violin (Wright) 49–52, 59, 141, 160 The Book of Mormon (Parker, Stone, Lopez) 13

breadcrumbs 30, 38, 40, 83, 85–6, 87, 100, 113, 139, 149, 170 Breaking Bad (Gilligan) 116–17 Brownstein, Oscar Lee (Okkie) xix, 3, 31, 74, 91, 93, 138, 170, 204, 208 Buried Child (Shepard) 66, 71, 73 Butterworth, Jez. See also The Ferryman Jerusalem 13 Casablanca (film) 143 certainty 44–8, 205, 208 character development xviii, 17, 38, 41, 53–9, 65, 68, 76, 111, 115–16, 126, 134, 143, 160–1, 163, 171, 179, 183, 187, 200, 202, 208 action as character 105–6 in Betrayal 88–91 in Breaking Bad 116–17 character arc 186 in comedy 124–5 doubling 60–2, 81–2, 151, 158 in drama 120–3 in A Streetcar Named Desire 55, 131 and tone 130–2 Chiang, Ted 2 The Children (Kirkwood) 74, 143, 180 choice(s) 12, 104, 203 A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 124, 126–7 Citizen Kane (film) 83 Clarke, Martha 88

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Index The Clean House (Ruhl) 14–15 Cloud 9 (Churchill) 76–7, 130–1, 136 comedy 11, 39, 110, 124–6 The Crown (Morgan) 164 Curtiz, Michael Casablanca 143 White Christmas 78 DiCaprio, Leonardo 164 Dickinson, Emily 123 Die Hard (film) 16, 72 double, doubled, doubling. See doubleness doubleness xviii, 22–38, 44, 48–50, 52–62, 68–72, 78, 91, 95, 140–9, 153, 158, 161, 185–6, 204 and empathy 81–2 Eagleman, David 44 Eagleton, Terry 122 Edison, Thomas 6 Elkin, Stanley 73 Eurydice (Ruhl) 2 exposition 95, 105–6, 139 The Ferryman (Butterworth) 169–70, 171, 177 Fleabag (Waller-Bridge) 14, 15, 63, 71, 105–6 Forster, E. M. 103, 160 gesture 8, 13, 54, 55, 57, 59, 66–7, 159, 165 The Glass Menagerie (Williams) 48 Goldwyn, Samuel 73 Good People (Lindsay-Abaire) 9, 166 gravity, gravitational 3, 20, 53, 90, 93, 111, 125, 131, 145, 170, 176–8, 182, 186, 200 gravitational pull 63, 71, 107, 119, 128, 141, 188, 200 Groundhog Day (Rubin, Ramis) 16, 124, 127

Hader, Bill 124 Hamilton (Miranda) 2 Hart, Mickey xviii Hart, Moss 73 Hemingway, Ernest 73 Herrmann, Bernard 157 hiding in plain sight 33, 37, 140 Hitchcock, Alfred 12, 90, 161. See also Psycho House (Shore) 185 Hume, David 82, 122 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) 74, 155, 158–9, 183 In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue (McCraney) 53 Indecent (Vogel) 2 Intimate Apparel (Nottage) 8, 65, 71, 73, 120, 132, 142 It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra) 127 Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden 14 Jenkins, Barry 53 Johnson, Samuel 31, 185 jokes 14–15, 28–34, 36, 37, 133, 140, 158, 174, 176 The King of the Yees (Yee) 60 Kinney, Richard 43 Levitin, Daniel 47 Lindsay-Abaire, David Good People 9, 166 Rabbit Hole 67, 166–7 Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill) 10, 11, 26, 71, 87–8, 111, 119, 123, 129, 146, 166–7, 201 Lyons, Margaret 205 McDonagh, Martin 3, 76. See also The Beauty Queen of Leenane Memento (film) 72

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Index memory(ies) 22, 24, 34, 64, 67, 79, 86, 93, 112, 131, 153, 171, 173, 180 metaphor 2, 7, 22, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 55, 62, 68, 102, 116, 144, 161, 180–1 Miller, Arthur 119 Moonlight (Jenkins) 53–4, 71, 202 Moore, Steve 189 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (Washburn) 77 Muybridge, Eadweard 28 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven) 7 Nottage, Lynn 66. See also Intimate Apparel; Ruined Nussbaum, Martha 122 An Octoroon (Jacobs-Jenkins) 14 Oedipus (Sophocles) 83, 90, 109, 163, 201 The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) 73 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (film) 163 Orton, Joe 7 Overboard (Marshall, Dixon) xv, 127 The Overstory (Powers) 174 pattern 46 recognition 2, 8, 30, 38, 41, 43, 44, 54, 59, 75, 85, 86, 88, 96, 99, 108, 128, 133, 147, 170, 175, 186, 199, 205 seeking 38, 44 payoff 6, 31–2, 33, 63–4, 128, 133–4, 136, 144, 154, 158, 175, 184, 186 The Peanut Butter Falcon (Nilson, Schwartz) 153–5 perception shift xix, 19–37, 48, 50, 60, 74, 111, 131, 136–7, 140, 155, 166, 169, 171–9, 180–9, 204–6 and pointers 142–4 Peter Pan (Barrie) 201 The Photographer (Glass, Gordon, Coe) 28, 34

The Piano Lesson (Wilson) 15, 93–4, 118 Pinter, Harold 13, 56–9, 84, 113. See also Betrayal Pirates of the Caribbean (Elliott, Rossio, Verbinski) 1, 2, 71 plot/story 83, 92, 93, 94, 99, 163, 174 pointers 95, 137–48, 150, 166–7, 181 and perception shifts 142–4 versus systems 144–5 The Power of the Dog (Champion) 149–50 Proust, Marcel In Search of Lost Time 25 Psycho (Hitchcock) 157 Rabbit Hole (Lindsay-Abaire) 67, 166–7 Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be (Anderson) 98, 102 repeat(ing) 8, 54, 62–3, 65, 71, 75, 147 repeatability 108–10 repetition. See repeat(ing) Richards, I.A. 44 The Rivals (Sheridan) 159 Robbins, Apollo 17 Robinson, Marilynne Gilead 84 Ruined (Nottage) 83, 132, 181 running gag 2, 40, 58–9, 62, 63, 158–60 Ruhl, Sarah The Clean House 14–15 Eurydice 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul 120 Seinfield (TV series) 159, 160 sequence 12, 41, 56, 84, 89, 91–2, 99, 114, 162, 169–70 setup 6, 30, 31–2, 63, 64, 72, 95, 128, 134–6, 140, 159, 174, 186 The Seven Streams of the River Otta (LePage) 100 Shakespeare, William 96–7, 105, 125, 182 The Merchant of Venice 22, 110, 201 Romeo and Juliet 83

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Index The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont) 165–6, 201 Shepard, Sam. See Buried Child; True West Shore, David 124. See also House The Simpsons (TV series) 77 The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan) 22, 36, 38, 39, 111 Skeleton Crew (Morisseau) 2, 187 Slave Play (Harris) 41 Smiley, Jane 12 Snowpiercer (film) 72 St. Aubyn, Edward At Last 48 Star Wars (film) 83, 165, 175 sticky, stickiness 99, 145–6 story. See plot/story Stravinsky, Igor 137 A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) 36, 54–5, 58, 60, 75, 83, 120, 131, 171, 202–3 theme 8, 66, 73–5, 199 This is Your Brain, on Music (Levitin) 47 timebound art xvii, xviii, xix, 7–18, 20, 26–9, 30–9, 45–8, 85–6, 97, 99, 102, 108, 112, 128, 145–9, 151, 184, 200, 202 machinery of 24–5 perception shifts in 180–2 systems in 63–74 tone shifts in 11–13, 76–8 Titanic (film) 13, 135, 163–4, 200, 201 tone 11–13, 71, 130–2, 156–7, 183, 185 shifts 76–8 tragedy 24, 109, 114–16, 118–23, 136, 174, 177, 208 True West (Shepard) 141, 166–7 The Truman Show (Niccol, Weir) 179

12 Monkeys (Peoples, Peoples, Gilliam) 174 Twilight (film) 165 uncertainty 5–6, 44, 45, 153, 154, 163, 165 The Usual Suspects (film) 36, 111 van Hove, Ivo 12 visual language 8, 19, 71, 110, 144 Vogel, Paula Baltimore Waltz 178, 200 Indecent 2 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 14, 22, 87, 99, 184 Waller-Bridge, Phoebe 14, 105–6. See also Fleabag We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (Drury) 4, 5, 69 weightless(ness) 20, 24, 25, 180, 181 White Christmas (Berlin, Krasna, Panama, Frank, Curtiz) 78–9 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Albee) 8, 34, 111 Wilde, Oscar 2. See also The Importance of Being Earnest Williams, Tennessee 2. See also A Streetcar Named Desire The Glass Menagerie 48 Wilson, Robert 7, 88, 184 Wit (Edson) 178, 200 Woke (Knight) 125–6 Zeder, Suzan 40