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was taking a shower because he had inadvertently left it within reach. Hmm......) When first read, almost 100% of the questions had to do with the layout of the bathroom: how long was the chain on the handcuffs, where did he put the gun down, and so on. In short, a slew of questions about physics because the layout of the theatrical world did not match the listeners' experience of their own Newtonian world. The playwright responded that she hadn't thought about this (!), and that in the end, it didn't matter - she just wanted to know what our emotional response was to the situation. Well, we couldn't have an emotional response because the questions about floor plans and ballistics and what-not created a static that edged out considering the conflict of the characters.

Another area of inattention that really annoys me is when a playwright does not think like a director and an audience member. So many of my fellow playwrights think that the writing comes first, that what they say (through the mouthpieces of their characters) is what the play is all about. This means that we listeners have to wade through bogs of "tawk" that have little to do with theatre. To me, a playwright, like a choreographer, is a sculptor of space and time. I do not understand how a playwright can write a play without having a stage in one's head, a virtual director shaping the action, and a mental audience responding because what characters say influences what they do, and what they do shapes what they say, and where they say and do it on stage (in relation to themselves and others) bends the gravity of time and place in certain ways and not in certain other ways, and all of this mix and flux is what makes theatre theatrical. If a playwright wants to just write dialogue, then he or she should write a radio play. But to create "theatre" is to think in 3-D all the time, to be always be dialectical and cosmological (every play is a solar system of interacting gravities).

The real sin of not paying attention to process is to make your audience pay attention to irrelevancies. The play goes along, and all of a sudden this detail pops up that the audience member just knows is not right, and that detail sticks like a burr in the brain, and then there is no way to draw the audience member back into the dream of the play. At the very least, getting the mechanics and physics right means that the audience will not be sitting there distracted by cockleburrs in their cortexes as the actors emote away.

But even more importantly, detail is a syntax, giving order to the elements that make up the "conversation" we call a play. Detail builds texture and "thing-ness," and humans, even the cyberized ones now umbilicaled to cell phones and internets, crave the comfort of embodiment for their three-dimensioned bodies. Now, syntax can always be broken if the purpose is, through the sabotage, to bring the audience to new or unexpected imaginings - think James Joyce or Shakespeare's "barbarian" energies. But if the syntax is broken through ineptitude or ignorance, then all we have are shards that bruise. Do the homework, and the work will most certainly bring the audience to home.

Learn more about this author, Michael Bettencourt.
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