eQuill article and interview
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Writing for Film and Stage: There’s a Difference
by Nedra Pezold Roberts
A screenwriter/playwright friend of mine says that “a film is a story told in images, and if dialogue is there, it is to support the images. A play is a story told in dialogue, and when images are present (such as a set design or projection images) they are there to support the dialogue.”
In my attempt to translate my first play from stage to screen, I have found my friend’s definitions to be true. And I’ve learned a bit about why.
Perhaps the best advice I’ve gotten about transitioning from one form to another is to write the film script as if I am imagining a silent movie, letting the visual component tell the story and using dialogue only where those images need support. It is the images, then, that create my characters. But any playwright knows that, in a stage play, the words themselves have to create the characters, and those characters reveal themselves through what they say and what is said about them.
Both the film and the play are ultimately collaborations with not just directors and actors but with so many others like set designers, lighting and sound technicians, costume designers, and behind-the-scene staff. The final product is a joint effort. The difference is that in film, the final product is unchanging, no matter how many times the film is viewed by an audience. In the theatre, however, the script remains unchanged but the performance on stage is different every night. And the playwright engages in a new series of collaborations, strategy sessions, and script adjustments each time a different theatre mounts a production of the same play. My play The Vanishing Point works well in smaller theatres of less than 100 seats, but when it played in a 350-seat theatre, we had to light the center of that stage and let surrounding darkness create the intimacy the play needed. Wrong Number fit beautifully on its rectangular Brooklyn stage, but when the play moved to the Manhattan theatre district, the theatre’s squarish stage had me rewriting the location of some scenes to accommodate the restraints of the space.
There are obvious differences between the two forms, such as budget, cast size, and use of space. The playwright has to envision the characters’ world within the physical limitations of the stage. Even with the flexibility that recent technology makes possible (especially visual projections or sound enhancements), the stage play has to create its world with and within the imagination. The film story has freedom to shoot a more literal world on location at any number of appropriate spots.
When it comes to delivering dialogue, film allows for multiple takes for the actor to get it right. But a performance on stage is live, and one little tongue twister in a play script can suddenly pull the audience out of the play or kill an important speech. In debriefing with the cast after the dress rehearsal for one of my plays, one actor pointed out a tongue twister that kept him in the grip of anxiety until he got past that line in the performance. I learned fast that some lines sound great while I type in front of the computer, but when an actor tries to deliver them, I need to pull out the pen for rewrites. The playwright must hear the script read aloud in order to learn what works.
In film, there is no intermission, no release from the tension building in the story. And in the process of filming, scenes can be shot any number of times and in any order. While on stage some recent plays forego an intermission, most still use the convention. The intermission has an impact on structure and demands a tightening in tension at the end of the first act right before the audience is released. The playwright’s job is to keep everyone involved and reel them back in for the second act. Except for the intermission, once the play begins, it is live and moves inexorably toward its end. There are no chances for multiple “takes”; the actors have to keep getting it right the first time.
Another point in shaping structure is that the playwright also has to consider costume changes in a way that a film writer doesn't. Stage actors don't have unlimited time for wardrobe changes. Timing affects the structure of the play script, and the playwright who doesn’t take into account any wardrobe changes needed to denote a change in time or place is facing rewrites during rehearsal. That was my penance when I didn’t give Wrong Number’s Cassie time to change the size of her padded baby-bump that would show the progression of her pregnancy. I had to get her off stage earlier at the end of one scene and add to the beginning of the following scene so she had time to dress.
The goal both forms share, however, is to tell a compelling story that makes the audience forget they are sitting in a theatre. Suck them in, make them laugh, break their hearts—then release them back into their own worlds all the more enriched for having visited yours.
Member Q&A: Nedra Pezold Roberts
by Clay Ramsey
Q: How did you find your way to the AWC? How long have you been a member?
A: I was still teaching when I found my way to the Atlanta Writers Club. I had a few years left before retirement from my first love, but at that point I could more clearly see the horizon where I was headed. And I’d always wanted to write. I searched the web for some direction about writing groups, and thank goodness it pointed me to the AWC. From that first meeting I attended over ten years ago, I knew I had found the right place for me to grow into the writer I wanted to be.
Q: You have achieved remarkable success as a playwright. Why plays? Have you been writing them for years, or is this a new development in your writing career? How did the AWC contribute to your success?
A: Like so many of our members, I started out writing novels. I finished three of them—all unpublished so far—but when theatres began accepting my plays, I turned my attention there. My heart has, for most of my life, been in the theatre with its immediacy of a live audience. So after forty years of teaching other writers plays, I turned my efforts toward writing my own. Luckily for me, the AWC continued to encourage me with its supportive community and with a series of speakers on the craft of writing. Those meetings were like master classes where I filled notebook after notebook with hints and advice that easily applied to crafting plays as well as novels. After all, a good story is a good story, no matter its form.
Q: How did you develop your craft? Is it a different skill-set than, say, that of novelists or poets?
A: I also learned playwriting from another group of masters during all those years I taught drama in the classroom. From Shakespeare to Stoppard, I soaked up everything they had to teach me. But what I quickly came to understand on my own is that the playwright, like the novelist, is a storyteller—but without the time or space a novel can offer to spin out the telling. Moreover, the playwright doesn't have the option of using narration or description the way the novelist does. In a play, dialogue has to do most of the heavy lifting. Even stage directions can’t tell the meat of the story. The audience isn’t going to read stage directions; they’re going to hear the characters speak and watch them try to contend with their lives. So the playwright must be prepared to listen to those voices as well as picture the world the characters inhabit.
There’s a saying I like that’s attributed to Lillian Hellman: “When the lights come up on stage, they come up on trouble. Otherwise, you don’t have a play.” That maxim has become a mini-mantra for me because it keeps me focused on my characters and their story. To discover that story, I move my characters into conflict, have them make choices, and then see how they deal with the consequences of those choices. They are the ones who lead me where the story needs to go.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a writer? How did you deal with it?
A: Athol Fugard once told a group of my students that the real challenge of playwriting is to figure out what to tell and when to tell it. Sounds simple—until you try it. Characters often have their own ideas about timing and can take over the direction of the story. More than once I’ve had an absolutely brilliant structure all laid out, until my characters started asserting themselves, elbowing their way downstage into the spotlight when I’d planned for them to wait a bit longer in the wings. But then, I never really get to know my characters until we’ve arm-wrestled through the script. They all seemed so malleable when I first met them in an image or a fragment of conversation.
Q: How many plays have you written? Do you have a favorite?
A: Since my retirement from teaching, I’ve written eleven plays and am currently wrestling with the characters in number twelve. I don’t really have a favorite among my children, even though a few gave me more birthing pain than the others. Each production, each cast, each performance is different, even though my script stays the same. And with every performance I attend, I get a new thrill watching the audience as the play unfolds. I sit in the back, and when I see the audience lean forward into the play, that’s when I know my story has connected.
Q: What have you learned about the business of writing as a working playwright?
A: As I’ve traveled across the country for readings and performances, I’ve forged other connections with directors, actors, and theatre staff. I stay in contact with them, even with stage managers, lighting technicians, and set designers. They are the advice givers, the morale boosters, the career supporters. The theatre world, like the publishing one, is difficult to break into. Networking is essential. The people you meet along the way—talk with, share a meal with, tear out your hair with—they are often the ones who can open the door, even if it’s only a crack.
Q: You offered your time and expertise to the AWC as a volunteer and later as the VP of Contests, Awards and Scholarships on the Board. What did you think of your experience and how did it change your perspective on the Club?
A: When you get right down to it, connecting with people is the storyteller’s job. Early on, I found that helping out at the AWC check-in tables at our monthly meetings and holding down the fort at our Writing Conference registration table were great ways for me to chat, match names with faces, get to know more members. But the years I served on the Board of Directors as VP of Contests, Awards and Scholarships gave me a different connection with our writers, and insight into the levels of confidence or insecurity in “putting ourselves out there,” letting strangers read our work. I came to realize that the contests are truly valuable for us all. They test our willingness to risk, ask us to have faith in ourselves, and offer us a continuing vehicle for growing as we hone the craft of writing.
Thank you, Nedra. Our best wishes for your continued success!
by Nedra Pezold Roberts
A screenwriter/playwright friend of mine says that “a film is a story told in images, and if dialogue is there, it is to support the images. A play is a story told in dialogue, and when images are present (such as a set design or projection images) they are there to support the dialogue.”
In my attempt to translate my first play from stage to screen, I have found my friend’s definitions to be true. And I’ve learned a bit about why.
Perhaps the best advice I’ve gotten about transitioning from one form to another is to write the film script as if I am imagining a silent movie, letting the visual component tell the story and using dialogue only where those images need support. It is the images, then, that create my characters. But any playwright knows that, in a stage play, the words themselves have to create the characters, and those characters reveal themselves through what they say and what is said about them.
Both the film and the play are ultimately collaborations with not just directors and actors but with so many others like set designers, lighting and sound technicians, costume designers, and behind-the-scene staff. The final product is a joint effort. The difference is that in film, the final product is unchanging, no matter how many times the film is viewed by an audience. In the theatre, however, the script remains unchanged but the performance on stage is different every night. And the playwright engages in a new series of collaborations, strategy sessions, and script adjustments each time a different theatre mounts a production of the same play. My play The Vanishing Point works well in smaller theatres of less than 100 seats, but when it played in a 350-seat theatre, we had to light the center of that stage and let surrounding darkness create the intimacy the play needed. Wrong Number fit beautifully on its rectangular Brooklyn stage, but when the play moved to the Manhattan theatre district, the theatre’s squarish stage had me rewriting the location of some scenes to accommodate the restraints of the space.
There are obvious differences between the two forms, such as budget, cast size, and use of space. The playwright has to envision the characters’ world within the physical limitations of the stage. Even with the flexibility that recent technology makes possible (especially visual projections or sound enhancements), the stage play has to create its world with and within the imagination. The film story has freedom to shoot a more literal world on location at any number of appropriate spots.
When it comes to delivering dialogue, film allows for multiple takes for the actor to get it right. But a performance on stage is live, and one little tongue twister in a play script can suddenly pull the audience out of the play or kill an important speech. In debriefing with the cast after the dress rehearsal for one of my plays, one actor pointed out a tongue twister that kept him in the grip of anxiety until he got past that line in the performance. I learned fast that some lines sound great while I type in front of the computer, but when an actor tries to deliver them, I need to pull out the pen for rewrites. The playwright must hear the script read aloud in order to learn what works.
In film, there is no intermission, no release from the tension building in the story. And in the process of filming, scenes can be shot any number of times and in any order. While on stage some recent plays forego an intermission, most still use the convention. The intermission has an impact on structure and demands a tightening in tension at the end of the first act right before the audience is released. The playwright’s job is to keep everyone involved and reel them back in for the second act. Except for the intermission, once the play begins, it is live and moves inexorably toward its end. There are no chances for multiple “takes”; the actors have to keep getting it right the first time.
Another point in shaping structure is that the playwright also has to consider costume changes in a way that a film writer doesn't. Stage actors don't have unlimited time for wardrobe changes. Timing affects the structure of the play script, and the playwright who doesn’t take into account any wardrobe changes needed to denote a change in time or place is facing rewrites during rehearsal. That was my penance when I didn’t give Wrong Number’s Cassie time to change the size of her padded baby-bump that would show the progression of her pregnancy. I had to get her off stage earlier at the end of one scene and add to the beginning of the following scene so she had time to dress.
The goal both forms share, however, is to tell a compelling story that makes the audience forget they are sitting in a theatre. Suck them in, make them laugh, break their hearts—then release them back into their own worlds all the more enriched for having visited yours.
Member Q&A: Nedra Pezold Roberts
by Clay Ramsey
Q: How did you find your way to the AWC? How long have you been a member?
A: I was still teaching when I found my way to the Atlanta Writers Club. I had a few years left before retirement from my first love, but at that point I could more clearly see the horizon where I was headed. And I’d always wanted to write. I searched the web for some direction about writing groups, and thank goodness it pointed me to the AWC. From that first meeting I attended over ten years ago, I knew I had found the right place for me to grow into the writer I wanted to be.
Q: You have achieved remarkable success as a playwright. Why plays? Have you been writing them for years, or is this a new development in your writing career? How did the AWC contribute to your success?
A: Like so many of our members, I started out writing novels. I finished three of them—all unpublished so far—but when theatres began accepting my plays, I turned my attention there. My heart has, for most of my life, been in the theatre with its immediacy of a live audience. So after forty years of teaching other writers plays, I turned my efforts toward writing my own. Luckily for me, the AWC continued to encourage me with its supportive community and with a series of speakers on the craft of writing. Those meetings were like master classes where I filled notebook after notebook with hints and advice that easily applied to crafting plays as well as novels. After all, a good story is a good story, no matter its form.
Q: How did you develop your craft? Is it a different skill-set than, say, that of novelists or poets?
A: I also learned playwriting from another group of masters during all those years I taught drama in the classroom. From Shakespeare to Stoppard, I soaked up everything they had to teach me. But what I quickly came to understand on my own is that the playwright, like the novelist, is a storyteller—but without the time or space a novel can offer to spin out the telling. Moreover, the playwright doesn't have the option of using narration or description the way the novelist does. In a play, dialogue has to do most of the heavy lifting. Even stage directions can’t tell the meat of the story. The audience isn’t going to read stage directions; they’re going to hear the characters speak and watch them try to contend with their lives. So the playwright must be prepared to listen to those voices as well as picture the world the characters inhabit.
There’s a saying I like that’s attributed to Lillian Hellman: “When the lights come up on stage, they come up on trouble. Otherwise, you don’t have a play.” That maxim has become a mini-mantra for me because it keeps me focused on my characters and their story. To discover that story, I move my characters into conflict, have them make choices, and then see how they deal with the consequences of those choices. They are the ones who lead me where the story needs to go.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a writer? How did you deal with it?
A: Athol Fugard once told a group of my students that the real challenge of playwriting is to figure out what to tell and when to tell it. Sounds simple—until you try it. Characters often have their own ideas about timing and can take over the direction of the story. More than once I’ve had an absolutely brilliant structure all laid out, until my characters started asserting themselves, elbowing their way downstage into the spotlight when I’d planned for them to wait a bit longer in the wings. But then, I never really get to know my characters until we’ve arm-wrestled through the script. They all seemed so malleable when I first met them in an image or a fragment of conversation.
Q: How many plays have you written? Do you have a favorite?
A: Since my retirement from teaching, I’ve written eleven plays and am currently wrestling with the characters in number twelve. I don’t really have a favorite among my children, even though a few gave me more birthing pain than the others. Each production, each cast, each performance is different, even though my script stays the same. And with every performance I attend, I get a new thrill watching the audience as the play unfolds. I sit in the back, and when I see the audience lean forward into the play, that’s when I know my story has connected.
Q: What have you learned about the business of writing as a working playwright?
A: As I’ve traveled across the country for readings and performances, I’ve forged other connections with directors, actors, and theatre staff. I stay in contact with them, even with stage managers, lighting technicians, and set designers. They are the advice givers, the morale boosters, the career supporters. The theatre world, like the publishing one, is difficult to break into. Networking is essential. The people you meet along the way—talk with, share a meal with, tear out your hair with—they are often the ones who can open the door, even if it’s only a crack.
Q: You offered your time and expertise to the AWC as a volunteer and later as the VP of Contests, Awards and Scholarships on the Board. What did you think of your experience and how did it change your perspective on the Club?
A: When you get right down to it, connecting with people is the storyteller’s job. Early on, I found that helping out at the AWC check-in tables at our monthly meetings and holding down the fort at our Writing Conference registration table were great ways for me to chat, match names with faces, get to know more members. But the years I served on the Board of Directors as VP of Contests, Awards and Scholarships gave me a different connection with our writers, and insight into the levels of confidence or insecurity in “putting ourselves out there,” letting strangers read our work. I came to realize that the contests are truly valuable for us all. They test our willingness to risk, ask us to have faith in ourselves, and offer us a continuing vehicle for growing as we hone the craft of writing.
Thank you, Nedra. Our best wishes for your continued success!