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The Dramatic Climax and "The Right Way to Write A Play"

Jon Tuttle
Francis Marion University

What was supposed to have been a fairly straightforward exercise devised for participants at the 1993 Presbyterian College Writers' Conference backfired in such an interesting way that it made me completely re-evaluate my teaching strategy for my playwriting courses at Francis Marion University. While the conference was geared primarily to college-aged and older writers, the lesson learned would, I hope, be valuable for someone teaching playwriting at almost any level. It has at any rate helped me predict and mitigate the problems my students have getting started on and completing a play, and it has helped them understand dramatic (and for that matter narrative) structure.

As the playwriting specialist at the conference, I was responsible for evaluating scripts submitted by six area writers, and for delivering a two-and-a-half-hour practicum on Writing for the Stage. The practicum, I found, presented some problems. For one thing, I had to address the unspoken supposition that I knew and would magically reveal "how to" write a play. I dispatched that myth by assuring everyone that, on that particular front, I had only a few clues, and that my responsibility was the same as theirs: to share ideas. For another, it was a very diverse group, experience-wise. One member was a theater professional; one was a college professor; some were new to playwriting and to varying degrees still intimidated by it; and some had not yet written plays but wanted to sit in anyway. Also, the types of plays submitted were all very different; some were straight, realistic dramas; one was a black comedy about a woman who buried her husband up to his neck on a beach at low tide and walked away; one was a Hurricane Hugo-mentary; one was a narrator-driven memory play. I was therefore unsure how to conduct a seminar whose content was specific enough to be actually useful, but at the same time general enough to be accessible to all involved.

I decided to discuss the one thing everybody would have some preconceptions about and which each play would presumably have in common--the climax.

Step One was to distribute a questionnaire which asked two simple questions:

1. Which moment, specifically, constitutes the climax of your play?
2. Why, specifically, is this moment the climax?

(Those who had not submitted a play were asked to answer the same questions about Hamlet, if they knew it, or, if they didn't, any recent popular movie.)

Step Two was supposed to have been a discussion of the definition of the dramatic climax, and thereafter an inquiry into whether and how each climax fulfilled the demands of each play (that is, the extent to which it addressed the central conflict, and the way in which it resolved it). What happened instead was that all but one of the writers had a difficult time getting past the first question: They could not (at least not immediately) decide which point constituted the climax in their own plays. One person, in fact, concluded she did not have one. These discoveries had the effect of putting some of the writers in a state of alarm, and me in a state of disarray, my outline having been thus torpedoed.

What ensued was a discussion about the process involved in writing a play, which quite naturally implied the question, "What is the right way to go about writing a play?" The woman who knew precisely where her climax was had decided upon that moment--the beach burial--first, and had then written the rest of her play around it. The others had started with basic situations or characters, and then, to varying degrees of success, tried to figure out what to do with them. They had not, that is, decided what would happen in their plays. As each of these latter plays was to some extent autobiographical, we proposed that there was a correlation between a writer's familiarity with his subject matter and his belief that it would find its own way.

It is important to note here that we did not summarily conclude that the majority had gone about writing their plays the "wrong" way. Indeed, some of them had enjoyed their voyage into the darkness, seemed to know intuitively where it was taking them, and had arrived at a conclusive and satisfying denouement. Others, however, conceded that without a preconceived destination in the form of a climax, they ended up feeling lost. Moreover, the woman who had decided upon her climax first admitted that she had problems writing toward it--making it possible--and indeed, some of the decisions she made along those lines were convenient contrivances.

Our first conclusion, therefore, took the form of a compromise: While writing from the climax out might deprive a writer of the process of discovery, doing the opposite might deprive a play of a plot. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure what the usefulness of this compromise was, except perhaps that each of the writers was able to examine the efficacy of his own invention methodology, and perhaps to experiment with another.

Our cart, by now, was well ahead of our horse. At this point we needed to backtrack and try to define what we meant by "climax." I presented the group with three short definitions culled from some of the "how-to" manuals on playwriting--new and old--and asked them to decide which best corroborated their definition of "climax" in the abstract and/or best described the climax of their particular plays. I chose these definitions precisely because they tend to contradict one another.

Laura Shamas, in Playwriting for Theater, Film and Television (an approachable text intended for high school- level writers), articulates the most conventional, popular definition of the dramatic climax, calling it "a huge explosion" in a play, or the "major event" (43). Similarly, to William Packard, in The Art of the Playwright (which assumes considerably more experience and expertise), the climax is "the peak of intensity of an action" (89). He points to the play- within-the-play scene in Hamlet as a useful example, and one with which we all nodded in general agreement.

Bernard Grebanier, in his venerable if Draconian Playwriting: How to Write For the Stage, concurs with both Shamas and Packard that a climax constitutes the significant "turning point" in the plot. However, he contends that it is "almost never the most exciting moment of the drama." Indeed, it can "very well be a moment that does not strike the audience with its importance at all." He parallels this pronouncement by observing, "So it is often in life. As . . . a biographer of George Washington has said, 'The turning points of lives are often not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved' " (107-8). Had I thought about it, I might at this point have entered Frost's "The Road Less Travelled" into evidence.

To further complicate things, Grebanier maintains that the play-within-the-play scene in Hamlet, while "the most exciting in the tragedy, is not, of course, the climax." Instead, it is "Hamlet's killing of Polonius," as it represents a truer turning point, and fulfills one of Grebanier's primary criteria for a climax, namely that it is "always a deed performed by the central character" (118, italics his).

Space will not allow, even if memory could fully reveal, a discussion about which of these definitions applied to which participant's play. Suffice it to say that they created useful disagreement and forced some new perspectives. Each writer had at this point to answer for himself three questions about his climax:

1. Is it the most exciting moment in the drama, or something less than that?
2. Is it an action taken by the primary character, or by someone less than that?
3. What type of action is it? A discovery, a reversal, a decision, or a resolution?

Whichever decisions each writer arrived at, they at least forced him to identify the primary turning point in his play, to boil his plot down to a single motion, and to evaluate the significance of that motion: Some plays were "about" an act of violence; others were "about" an act of kindness, or a plea for connection, or a vital revelation--the "I've got a secret" structure typified by Equus and most whodunits. In this way each writer had to arrive at a definition of "climax" as it applied to his play, and further to decide what type of play he had--not always consciously--written. This process constituted the crux of the practicum.

The next (and last) step was to throw into the mix Oscar Brownstein's definition of the dramatic climax. I chose it partly because it would challenge all the aforementioned prescriptions or assumptions, but mostly because I happen to admire it very much. In Strategies of Drama, Brownstein proposes a definition of the climax which, as he says, is "very different from one traditional view that associates the term with a 'turning point' near the middle of a play" (118).

To Brownstein's eye, the climax happens not on the stage, but rather in the audience; it is "an actual event in the life of the spectator" in the form of a "perception shift." More than a "moment in the present or a collection of impressions," it is instead "one whole thing, an expanding sphere of discovered significance" (117-118). More specifically still, it is a revelation which should astonish us "into a condition that demands a revision of our understanding of [the central character] of his motives, and therefore of the significance of the play" (115). He argues further that:

Ordinary perception shifts are ordinarily daily occurrences; those that are epiphanal draw on a reservoir of feeling and thought sufficiently large that the experience becomes a revisioning of the world. Plays provide through art something that the conditions of everyday life rarely permit, the experience of an event that engages us quite personally but startles us into a distanced response . . . . In that way the play is not a statement about the world but becomes an experienced perception of our world. (118)

Among our group, there was general agreement and even delight with Brownstein's definition. Each playwright was willing--in fact eager--to admit that the off-stage effect Brownstein describes was, in retrospect, what he wanted his on- stage climactic moment to cause. Our understanding of the dramatic climax was therefore expanded to include--perhaps even to emphasize--Brownstein's "perception shift." and it was on this not that our practicum happily ended.

Unhappily, I later realized that ending on that note may have implied the wrong answer to the question, "What is the right way to go about writing a play?" Strategies of Drama is, after all, more a descriptive examination of dramatic structure than a prescriptive manual on playwriting--a crucial distinction that ought to have been made clear. For if one accepts Brownstein's definition, and therefore his assertion that "dramatic art is best understood as a grand strategy for creating experience" (119), one might reasonably conclude that he must, in beginning a play, consciously strategize, as his chief priority, the orchestration and indeed timing of an audience's collective, unconscious emotional response. While this may be a noble objective, I'm sure that it's not wholly possible. Many playwrights are of course frequently astounded, and sometimes outraged, at audience's (and critics') responses to their plays.

In an essay titled "A National Dream Life" in his book Writing in Restaurants, David Mamet more or less corroborates Brownstein's theory by proposing that "We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life" (8). By this he means that a play "is a quest for a solution" to a question, a quest in which "the law of psychic economy operates":

In dreams, we do not seek answers which our conscious (rational) mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally, e.g.: how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people . . . our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete--we feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening. (8-9, italics mine)

As a means of evaluating a play, Mamet's comments are particularly insightful and useful. In a good play, the answer to the question posed by the plot (e.g., Will Hamlet avenge his father's murder? --Yes.) is of course never as interesting as the underlying ramifications--the themes-- attendant to that answer (in Hamlet, the uses of power, the nature of death, the wages of idealism, etc.). Any thorough discussion of a play would naturally dwell more on what the dramatic action meant, as opposed to what it was.

But as an approach to writing or to teaching writing, such comments can be terrifying. To encourage a writer --especially a young writer--to think in terms of "psychic economy" or "spheres of discovered significance"--that is, to ask him to intellectualize all that he might otherwise unconsciously invest in his plays--would be to intimidate him into creative paralysis. It would also mean presupposing a writer's awareness of the various thematic layers and psychological textures in his work, which would of course be wildly misleading and discouraging.

In earlier playwriting courses, I have made what I now see as the mistake of introducing my students to such theory before allowing them enough creative practice. Early in the semester, for instance, after getting them started on their own one-acts, I have asked them to discuss the "meaning" of the published and sometimes famous plays we used as models. Having examined, say, a play's metaphors, allusions, motifs or political implications, they have too often asked me, in horror, "But do we have to think about all that?"

No. They don't, and they shouldn't. English courses-- particularly college English courses--are notorious enough for inflating and glorifying the left hemisphere at the expense of the right, and for wringing the life out of whatever notion a student may have that he might participate in literature on any other level than that of wishful admirer. Having no desire to perpetuate that injustice, I now have my students start by focusing on basic structural elements (e.g., the difference between situation and conflict), and language (the difference between text and subtext), and provide them with Mamet's advice about beginning a play:

I usually don't start with a theme in mind, I usually start just writing . . . . To write a play with a stringent plot is wonderfully, incredibly demanding. That's what I try to do when I write a play: stick to the plot. If I do that, the rest will take care of itself. The theme is a post facto consideration . . . . I follow the plot wherever it happens to lead. ("Mamet on Playwriting" 11)

In other words, I de-emphasize the literary element of the course--and of drama itself--and, without too much in the way of prescriptive guidance, bid them write.

Only later in the semester, when they are--predictably-- groaning about the difficulty they are having constructing a "stringent" plot, do I ask them to identify the climax of their plays, and often find that they can't, or don't yet have one. I then try to replicate the experiment I tried at the Presbyterian College conference, and present them with the various definitions and descriptions aforementioned--Brownstein's included. It is at this later point, I hope, when they have discovered their own way to write a play and are at least part way through the tunnel they're building, that they can most usefully and constructively start thinking in terms of where it is leading them. Ideally, this will be a way of facilitating, according to their own terms, the completion and the success of their plays.

Words Cited

Brownstein, Oscar Lee. Strategies of Drama. New York: Greenwood, 1991.

Grebanier, Bernard. Playwriting: How to Write for The Theater. 1961. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979.

Mamet, David. "Mamet on Playwriting." The Dramatists' Guild Quarterly 30.1 (1993): 8-14.

--------. Writing in Restaurants. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Packard, William. The Art of the Playwright. New York: Paragon, 1987.

Shamas, Laura. Playwriting for Theater, Film and Television. White Hall: Betterway, 1991.