What Makes Theatre Great?

"I deliberately look for colourful people. They're are very right for theatre. Theatre has to be theatrical" - Lanford Wilson

CHARACTERS

If you enjoy anything that stimulates the mind then we have something in common. For me, its theatre. There's something about it which makes it so different to other forms of art. Yes, its live, direct and in you face but its the sheer factor that it is life for all its reality, yet it is not real.

Ever wondered what playwrights think about when they create the characters we come to know for those few hours we sit with them, get to know them, sympathise with them and then fall in love with them if we like them. If not, we are more than hapy to see them go to the gallows.

I imagine its like the process of pregnanacy, just less physical and emotional. As a playwright, you carry a character inside you from the stage of conception and then give birth. Same way, you become a lunatic as you hit the keys, puncnhing those words out and soimetimes, you find you have to say those words out loud; inorder to get a feel and rythmn of what they sound like. Guess what, you become a lunatic for them. Poeple even laugh at you and think you have gone crazy. I know, it has happened to me and still does. I talk to myself on the bus and a little while back, a friend asked me why I was having a converstaion with myself? Though my lips were not moving, the characters had me engrossed deep in converstion and I forgot about my immediate surrondings. They had my full and undivided attention.

Same way, an established playright has a relationship with their characters. It is one of the tricks to creating colourful characters. To know them like you know yourself. However, you must also be able to let them breathe and walk on their own. That's why you have to seperate yourself from them and let them tell their story. Like you would let go of your children, when you know its time to stop babysitting them.

Characters are human beings in play, they have a mind and a will. A personality and can their own decisions. They live like we do. They are vicarious about life and if they are dull and boring, they are not afarid to let it show either. Characters are who they are.

Writing my play has meant a lot of thinking and I am yet to scracth the surface of what makes a great masterpeiece. I get nervous that I am might be going down the route of melodrama but if I don't let it flow like it is now, then how will I be able to correct myself and avoid the melodrama I hate in theatre productions?

Time to get back to the paper right before amd write those words ike tomorrow is the day it gives birth to itself on the live stage.