The Working Playwright
by Melissa Bell
It’s All in the Details
Do you know your character’s favorite color? Favorite dish? The street they lived on as a child? What was the game their mother played with them when they were five? Why do they keep an item in their pocket and when do they take it out and stroke it? What memories does it provoke? What emotion does it conjure in your character?
Details. From the larger, to the smaller, and from the smaller to the larger, details make the character specific and unique. This unique person is facing the challenges you give them, the puzzle to solve, or the recognition they must make to bring catharsis to the play. What are the details of the character’s life, and how will those details help them obtain the thing they want or be the obstacle that stands in their way?
In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, the king, Oedipus, has vowed to cure his city of a pestilence by finding and exiling the murderer of the previous king, Laius, late husband of his wife Jocasta. To discover who this man is, Oedipus consults many people: Oracles, herdsmen, and slaves who offer clues to the murderer’s identity. But the most telling clue is a set of scars on his ankles. Oedipus bears the same scars on his own ankles, which had been pierced by his father who sent him away as an infant to be killed. The herdsman given this grim task took pity on the baby and passed him along to another herdsman, who then passed the baby along to his king, and Oedipus, named after his swollen feet, grew up not knowing his true identity or heritage. When Oedipus learns that the murderer bore the same scars he carries, Oedipus realizes that a man he once killed in a roadside brawl was none other than King Laius, Jocasta’s first husband, and that he (and his actions) is the cause of the plague on his city. Moreover, he discovers that Laius was his true father and that Jocasta, his wife, is his mother. This had been predicted by the Oracle at his birth and had now come true.
Wow. Talk about why detail matters. It was the clue that solved the entire puzzle, unlocking his past, present and future.
Your character may not be a king who murdered his father, but they do have a want and a need and those wants and needs will lead your character on a journey of consequences and reckoning.
The same rule applies to objects. Does an object have a special meaning for your character? What does it symbolize? Is it shared by another? How is it used for them or against them?
In Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moorish military general Othello is manipulated into suspecting his wife, Desdemona, of adultery. While wooing her, Othello gifts Desdemona with a handkerchief, which she cherishes. When she accidentally drops it, her maid finds it and turns it over to her husband, Iago, who uses it in his manipulation of Othello as revenge for denying him a significant military post. When Othello asks Desdemona to show him the handkerchief and she is unable to produce it, Othello becomes convinced of her infidelity and smothers her. It is only after her death that he realizes the significance he had placed upon an object as easily lost as a handkerchief, which allowed him to be manipulated by an evil and cunning opponent.
What are the details in your character’s lives? What do they represent to the character and to the theme? How does the physical enhance the metaphysical? In a play, every detail matters.
Try to give your characters details that reveal and reflect their journey. Are you working on a play right now? Have you finished a play? Make a list of the details that you have used to support the theme of your play and make sure they are placed in a way that affects the outcome. The details often provide the “button” that your audience can hold on to after the curtain goes down.
Melissa Bell’s work has been featured in the New York Times and has been awarded Finalist for Henley Rose Playwright Competition and nominated for Best Adaptation & Modernization by New York Shakespeare for LADY CAPULET and awarded Honored Finalist for the Collaboration Award by the Women in Arts & Media Coalition for COURAGE. Read her work on the New Play Exchange.