Published Work Review: Playwrights Teach Playwriting 2 edited by Joan Herrington with Crystal Brian

This book is meant to help one TEACH playwriting...so can it help one learn something about BEING a playwright?

As many of you know, I’m a proud educator. In the past, I have taught literacy/reading, English, special education, theater/drama, acting, playwriting, devising, and reader’s theater. In my preparations for moving to New York City this summer, I am applying to teach theater, musical theater, acting, playwriting, creative writing, etc in any school with a relevant opening. So, I am diving back into both old and new (to me) resources to improve my game in order to kill those demo lessons (and hopefully get a job)!

I always have books on my wishlist, so my friends and family got me a few for Christmas this past year. One of those books was Save the Cat!, which I covered a short while back, and another was Playwrights Teach Playwriting 2, a book of essays from acclaimed teacher/playwrights on the art of teaching playwriting. I spent a week aggressively highlighting, notating, and tabbing up this book with two objectives in mind: one, to see if there were any cool exercises or teaching tips that could help me in my quest to become a full time theater teacher of some kind, and two, to see if perhaps this book held any relevant advice for being a playwright.

Let’s find out together.

Here is the book’s official summary:

Playwrights Teach Playwriting 2, created by some of the most well-respected playwrights of our time, is an extraordinary guide to writing plays and teaching playwriting. Framed with a foreword by Mac Wellman that lauds the value of the diversity contained in this book, and a concluding chapter that highlights key insights from the individual chapters, [this book] provides a powerful tool to writers at all stages of their careers for writing a play and also offers effective approaches to teaching the craft.

Like some of the other books I’ve covered here before, this one is essentially a collection of essays of various lengths by various experts. If you really wanted to, you could pick this book up and just pick and choose which essays you wanted to read based on the author. There are chapters from playwrights such as Sarah Ruhl, Octavio Solis, Carlos Murillo, Suzan-Lori Parks, and more! The essays in this book are great if you’re a teacher especially. I felt a little ‘meh’ on Jon Robin Baitz’s unfortunately, but the others all had at least one moment that really stuck with me.

I’m going to discuss the essays that I personally found most helpful for playwrights specifically. I recommend the whole book, but if you’re mainly a playwright and not a teacher, these are the ones I think you should pay attention to: Steven Dietz, Lisa Kron, and Lucas Hnath.

Steven Dietz

Critic Chris Jones from the Tribune once called Steven Dietz “the most ubiquitous American playwright whose name you may never have heard”. And man, if that isn’t true! The man has been consistently produced all over the place since 1981, with his most recent production (that I could find) being in 2023 of his play, Gaslight, based on a 1939 play by Patrick Hamilton of the same name.

Dietz’s essay contains a lot of actionable exercises that a playwright can do on their own, even though they are usually done within Dietz’s playwriting courses. One example is of an exercise in which one is supposed to experiment with what he calls “turns” (“an escalation, major new information, a reversal, a surprise, a paradigm shift…[something that] keeps pulling us in”). The playwright is supposed to write a two to three character scene of about three pages that contains three turns on every page. Dietz states that the goal of the exercise isn’t necessarily to produce new material, but to go to the playwriting “gym”.

I also loved Dietz’s approach to writers block and the notion that one must have a concrete idea to begin writing. He states, “A whole play will not land on you!...The idea is often the smallest part of your play.” Instead, what he emphasizes is putting an image into action, and then putting the action in time. And then, instead of brainstorming, utilize close questioning to analyze what the image is already giving. “Don’t make it interesting,” Dietz says, “Don’t! Make it simple.”

This and other useful advice is peppered throughout the essay. I would basically be rewriting the essay by stating it all here, so I won’t— instead, I’ll end with my favorite quote: “Don’t write your masterpiece. Write the play in front of you.”

Lisa Kron

If you’re in theater, you’ve heard of Lisa Kron. Not only is she a prolific solo artist, but she also wrote the book for Fun Home, which won her a Tony award. She teaches masterclasses to students all over the country— she even came to Sarah Lawrence while I was there for grad school! She is known to be a fun and effective teaching artist.

What I really like about this essay is how Kron frames the whole idea of theater, playwriting, and performing in general. She writes, “Drama utilizes the gap between what people think is happening and what’s really happening.” And that’s something that makes theater (and writing for it) such a different animal than, say, writing for film— that it’s playing within the liveness of performance, those moments in between lines where you’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen next. Kron also writes that “transformation [is] the essential theatrical gesture”, which sorta blew my mind a bit. I take “theatrical gesture” here to mean a nonverbal motif or element that can be utilized as a storytelling tool. The idea that transformation, either of emotions, situations, characters, etc. is the root of live storytelling just feels so right to me. It also gives a playwright something concrete to look for in their own work.

This essay also contains two different exercises that I believe a playwright could do on their own! So along with the great musings on the nature of theater that can open up the mind of a theatre artist, there are actionable things as well.

Lucas Hnath

If you know of Lucas Hnath, it might be for one of his Obie Award winning plays, Red Speedo or The Christians. Or, perhaps, you know him from his play A Doll’s House, Part 2 that premiered on Broadway in 2017, which was nominated for a Tony. Either way, Hnath has cemented himself as a prominent voice in the NYC theater community.

This essay is one of the longer ones (14 pages) and is full of exercises, muses on playwriting, and further reading recommendations. I counted at least three exercises that one could utilize! Hnath’s focus seems to be on playfulness, immediacy, and action. He writes, “My drive to write plays is rooted in a desire to reach back to something that both frightened me and gave me a sense of wonder at a very young age. To some degree, what I’m doing now isn’t that far from what I was doing in my room at age eight.” I feel the same way—playing pretend was (and I guess still is!) my favorite activity as a child.

An exercise I really loved from this essay was one on conflict. Hnath states, “…we often enjoy talking about problems”, and this exercise instructs the playwright to list all the problems the characters in the play have, and then (in a separate column) write how the character reacts to, solves, ignores, etc the problem. I looooove this, personally, as I think it would make character motivations, obstacles, and objectives very clear. I’m definitely going to try it with my current projects!

I loved this book, as you can probably tell. It contains a wealth of useful information from some of the foremost playwriting minds of our current times. All in all, I counted almost thirty actionable exercises within its pages that playwrights at any point in their career can utilize! And if you’re a teacher too, there’s so many tips on teaching included on top of that. Honestly, it fires me up to read the words of playwrights who are supremely passionate about their craft, and this book definitely inspired me.

Have you read this book? Do you want to? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

I’ll be back next week with an NPX Round-Up!

Happy theatre making!

~Brynn