The second page of every script has sections for Characters, Place and Time. I’ve discovered that Time can be tricky.
If the Time for your play is 1860 and one of your characters says, “Hey, man, what a groovy chick,” if it’s not a deliberate choice, something is wrong. If the play is set in 1968, however, then we’re copacetic.
But what if you’re not writing a period piece? What if it’s set now? Which now? Now, the moment you’ve written the play, or now, the moment it’s being performed. Either way, we have some problems.
In a rehearsal for my play, I Thought I Knew You, an actor had a question. Who is Mr. Skinflint? At first, I thought it was funny that he didn’t know the term skinflint. Then I asked around, and no one under 50 knew what a skinflint was. (It means someone’s a cheapskate or a miser. From the phrase, “to skin a flint”, which was uproarious in 1699.)
I don’t want dated language in my contemporary play, which takes play “now”, and it got me thinking, what else is going to date? I have another play, written not too long ago, where Twitter is mentioned. Whoops. The play now has a footnote that Twitter can be changed to whatever the social media platform du jour is.
But this is always a problem. Language evolves, discards, and mutates. How long will text speak last? Which companies, that are verbs today, will be gone tomorrow? Playwrights walk a fine line in being naturalistic, universal, and dated.
The challenge is to write a play for the future. I don’t want audiences to say, well, that play takes place in the long ago past of 2024, so I can distance myself. I want it to be contemporary forever. Which means, I’m going to have to accept that my script is not immutable. Scraps of slang, references to things that I didn’t realize were contemporary, all should be subject to change, to bring a play up to date.
Movies and TV are frozen in time. Watching Seinfeld is like peering into a time portal (What are answering machines? Could people just show up at airport gates when they weren’t flying anywhere?) Theatre is now. And that means, I can’t be precious with my script. Future directors, if something doesn’t scan anymore, I give you permission to change it. I can only hope that my plays will be around long enough for people to ask, “What exactly was Twitter?”
If the Time for your play is 1860 and one of your characters says, “Hey, man, what a groovy chick,” if it’s not a deliberate choice, something is wrong. If the play is set in 1968, however, then we’re copacetic.
But what if you’re not writing a period piece? What if it’s set now? Which now? Now, the moment you’ve written the play, or now, the moment it’s being performed. Either way, we have some problems.
In a rehearsal for my play, I Thought I Knew You, an actor had a question. Who is Mr. Skinflint? At first, I thought it was funny that he didn’t know the term skinflint. Then I asked around, and no one under 50 knew what a skinflint was. (It means someone’s a cheapskate or a miser. From the phrase, “to skin a flint”, which was uproarious in 1699.)
I don’t want dated language in my contemporary play, which takes play “now”, and it got me thinking, what else is going to date? I have another play, written not too long ago, where Twitter is mentioned. Whoops. The play now has a footnote that Twitter can be changed to whatever the social media platform du jour is.
But this is always a problem. Language evolves, discards, and mutates. How long will text speak last? Which companies, that are verbs today, will be gone tomorrow? Playwrights walk a fine line in being naturalistic, universal, and dated.
The challenge is to write a play for the future. I don’t want audiences to say, well, that play takes place in the long ago past of 2024, so I can distance myself. I want it to be contemporary forever. Which means, I’m going to have to accept that my script is not immutable. Scraps of slang, references to things that I didn’t realize were contemporary, all should be subject to change, to bring a play up to date.
Movies and TV are frozen in time. Watching Seinfeld is like peering into a time portal (What are answering machines? Could people just show up at airport gates when they weren’t flying anywhere?) Theatre is now. And that means, I can’t be precious with my script. Future directors, if something doesn’t scan anymore, I give you permission to change it. I can only hope that my plays will be around long enough for people to ask, “What exactly was Twitter?”