There’s been a lot of hurlyburly going on at Pronoia the past few months, so we’re wrapping up the reading left to summarize in a few large format posts, but that’s ok, because I wanted to compare these works anyway.

How Not to Write a Play is a 1955 expansive attack on the writing community (and theater culture at large) by failed playwright and prominent theatre critic Walter Kerr, while Michael Bigelow Dixon’s Breaking From Realism is a series of exercises and workshops for playwrights on how to introduce more fantastical, and dare I say, theatrical, elements into their works.

Despite being separated by more than a half-century the two books (which I read simultaneously) often seem to be in conversation with each other, clearly showing that Walter Kerr’s impassioned pleas went unheeded in the fifties, and I sadly must report that Dixon’s also failed to move the needle, as I found his work unfortunately still needed a decade later.

The key points of each book can be boiled down to this: theater has lost its audience because we have willfully abandoned the charge to entertain the audience, and instead of run into the arms and dictates of realism, creating a boring, didactical, and predictable theater that few people want to watch. Kerr focuses on how we got to this point, through the then-groundbreaking work of Ibsen, how it has grown stale over the last twenty years, and why that’s a problem. Dixon focuses on how embracing non-realistic forms of expression can transport the audience emotionally and therefore make a better case for whatever the playwright is trying to say. Both authors underscore how its theater’s failing, and not the fault or error of the audience, that audiences are dwindling, and that something (ideally something exciting) needs to happen to avert this.

Both men tend to ignore the (to me obvious) counter-theatrical movements that support their points, and instead of acknowledging that what they want is already being done squint their eyes, rub their foreheads, and continue to insist on trying to help people who clearly don’t want any. For Walter Kerr his dream of an exciting, skillful, and rapturously written theater already existed in musical theatre, for Michael Bigelow Dixon his want to see a vast array of non-realistic portrayals has long been a mainstay of sketch comedy.

Instead of trying to make either of these forms palatable, both men just keep gesturing vaguely at their preferred form (traditional dramatic plays) and ask them to be a little more like the thing they don’t want to deal with. At least Kerr acknowledges musical theatre in the last few pages of the epilogue, where he offers a defensive (if an unimaginative one,) saying in so many words that musical theatre is inherently not serious (he always calls it “musical comedy”) and therefore not what he is talking about. Kerr fails to imagine musicals which conquer darker territory such as Next to Normal, Rent, The Mad Ones, or even Hamilton which is humorous but attempts to paint a serious portrait.

Dixon, however, continues to ignore anything whatsoever that is so gauche as to say it wants to entertain in discrete bits, despite the fact that many of the elements he suggests (expressionism, anthropomorphism, virtuosity, and recontextualism, to pick out just a few) have been used for the entirety of the time that sketch comedy has been a ‘serious’ art form. In fact Dixon seems to (I read the book months ago and am relying on my notes) ignore comedy entirely, only using it as an example of the salt that makes the other flavors stand out more.

Both books are highly worth reading, especially if you are a producer or writer, and I found myself nodding along to Kerr’s rants, and since his book is more intellectually stimulating I want to leave you with two of his more interesting assertions (in summarized for):

The Rotten Intellegentsia
Kerr states that the conventional narrative about theater is this: theatre is an intellectual practice, one that is cerebral and fortifying for the culture and so it cannot possibly stand up against the sugary desires of the hoi polloi who merely want to be (blech) entertained and so flock to the dumbed down cinema for their candy and sweets, but for the good of mankind we need to browbeat back into the REAL theater and get them to eat their vegetables. After all, what we’re doing is so important.

Kerr instead avers: the theater used to be a place for the common man, indeed every piece of meaningful theater (and he goes further and says, art as a whole) that has stood the test of time has been calibrated to entertain and appeal to a wide audience (here he particularly calls out Shakespeare and Moliere as men who were writing for the cheap seats.) This is not an accident, or an example of towering genius being able to disguise deep truths in pulpy fun, instead it is the pulpy fun that allows for the reveal of deep truths. At the turn of the century, theater (particularly English-language theatre) intentionally turned away the common plumber and the shop-girl in order to gain respectability among the rich class, and when they left them behind, movies were there to scoop them up. It is therefore our fault, and our hubris, which has turned away the audience, and our responsibility to woo them back.

This argument mirrors things I have thought for a long time (and in fact wrote a sketch about- Over Plays, about a fellow claiming Shakespeare was rubbish because it was all swordfights and poison for the entertainment of the audience,) and is something I want to change with Pronoia, where we focus on hopefully exciting work.

The Contradiction of Thesis
Another problem Kerr points to in then-modern plays is the idea of trying to teach lessons or create “thesis plays*”. Basically we’re trying to teach audiences lessons and it never works.

Why? Kerr essentially says that in order to create an obvious, compelling thesis, the author must keep his thumb on the story to make sure it doesn’t get away from him and lose track of the point it’s trying to make. When this happens, Kerr states, characters become tools instead of people, and that a truly interesting character (which he argues is the primary thing that engages audiences) will naturally exist in a state of contradiction, but those contradictions will complicate a clear and present thesis, and eventually will lead to a crisis: either the playwright allows for a breathing, complex, contradictory character and muddies the thesis; or a playwright holds true to the thesis and neuters the character.

In effect Kerr counsels playwrights to not try to “say” anything so much as to “find” characters and put them in situations that allow the audience to extract what they need, want, or can out of that situation. In so doing Kerr speaks into being the value of Barthes “Death of the Author” almost a decade before it is published.

While at first I disagreed with his premise, after he laid out his arguments I thought about my own writing and how the things that I like best and strike a chord with audiences often do grow organically out of character, while the things that languish and I have trouble with are those with too harsh a containment on their thesis. This holds true even for the upcoming Start Your Endings which began with a rather rigid thesis, which softened and then changed through the writing and editing process.

A Final Thought on Non-Realism
Before reading Dixon’s book I noticed a weird, and for me unsatisfying, trend in many plays written after ~2013, many of them from authors I presume to be recently out of their grad writing programs. After reading his book I wondered if students (or literary agents) either directly or indirectly took his lessons about non-realism, and inelegantly welded them on to ungainly frames, similar to Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting being mis-interpreted and misapplied (in her view.)

I noticed that many recent plays were largely realistic, save for one sudden, brief, and discordant surrealistic element that came from nowhere and was scarcely mentioned again. Notably Jaclyn Bauhaus’ India Pale Ale, which is mostly about feelings of alienation as a modern American with south Asian ancestry, but has an extended sequence (“Act III”) that is a nightmare that takes place on a pirate ship. The pirate ship is mentioned before in the script, as is the captain of the ship, but it’s still hundreds of years before the main action, that doesn’t have a direct relationship with the plot of the play.)

In Lilliana Padilla’s How to Defend Yourself a play that has thus far been about college students wrestling with the aftermath of a rape at a campus party (and taking self-defense classes) the last minute throws us backwards through time at a series of parties (where nothing particularly violent happens) and introduces a character we’ve never seen or developed a relationship with.) Notably, I read a pre-published copy of the play where this ending doesn’t exist and is instead a semi-realistic chant by the characters stating a core facet of their identity (which I think works much better.)

*Kerr actually talks about three types of plays: problem plays, thesis plays, and propaganda plays, and this discussion is interesting but we don’t have time for it here.