New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting

Rating:
Summary: You've got to be kidding! (How to Write an Unwatchable Play)
Review: A book on modern playwriting techniques? What a great idea! This book, though, ain't it.
The techniques the author mentions may be legitimate...but his understanding of them is...well, bizarre. Worst of all: the book is BADLY WRITTEN. Not only are his theatrical concepts ludicrous, he can't even explain them. Along the way he makes up some ridiculous terminology in an attempt to legitimize these vague and poorly-thought out concepts. The exercises he suggests are a joke! (Basically they tell the reader to read a specific monologue and then to write one just like it. Whoever heard of learning playwriting by rote?) If one were to write a play the way this author suggests, the end result would be unendurable and inscrutable.
(As a side note: almost none of the techniques he covers are "new". They were developed by the likes of Beckett, Strindberg, Brecht, Thorton Wilder and somebody named Shakespeare.)

Rating:
Summary: You've got to be kidding! (How to Write an Unwatchable Play)
Review: A book on modern playwriting techniques? What a great idea! This book, though, ain't it.
The techniques the author mentions may be legitimate...but his understanding of them is...well, bizarre. Worst of all: the book is BADLY WRITTEN. Not only are his theatrical concepts ludicrous, he can't even explain them. Along the way he makes up some ridiculous terminology in an attempt to legitimize these vague and poorly-thought out concepts. The exercises he suggests are a joke! (Basically they tell the reader to read a specific monologue and then to write one just like it. Whoever heard of learning playwriting by rote?) If one were to write a play the way this author suggests, the end result would be unendurable and inscrutable.
(As a side note: almost none of the techniques he covers are "new". They were developed by the likes of Beckett, Strindberg, Brecht, Thorton Wilder and somebody named Shakespeare.)

Rating:
Summary: An important new approach to playwriting
Review: For those who are interested in exploring the technique of the language playwrights, Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, Constance Congdon, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Eric Overmeyer, Paul Castagno's book offers a hands-on, informative approach that is useful to working playwrights and to dramaturgs who work with new forms of playwriting.

Prof. Castagno bases his technique on important theoretical approaches (using the ideas of thinkers such as Mikhail Bahktin and Russion Formalists) that inform the work of these new playwrights. I am currently using this book in my graduate seminar in playwriting, and my students are using the language-based model that Castagno has developed to create some very interesting and exciting new plays.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is Castagno's expertise in the field of commedia, which he brilliantly ties into the post-modern formalist technique of writers like Len Jenkin, who subvert archetypal characters and stage figures in their plays.

In a field that is dominated by cookie-cutter "how-to-write-your-play" texts, New Playwriting Strategies offers a refreshing, subversive, and exciting new approach to writing plays. For those who are interested in adding more dramaturgical tools to their dramatic technique, I highly recommend this text.

Rating:
Summary: A necessary but mediocre book
Review: I have completely mixed feelings about this book. Part of me wants to celebrate anyone who brings more attention to writers such as Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, and Suzan-Lori Parks -- some of the most exciting playwrights in America -- but another part of me is deeply uncomfortable with the clunky, jargon-filled sentences and often obtuse ideas herein.

The best element of this book is the exercises sprinkled through each chapter. In fact, it's tempting to say: Get the book for the exercises, read nothing else. They won't make you a great playwright, but they will get you thinking about the possibilities of the theatre in ways that no other handbook will.

There are some good ideas within the text itself, too, but there are far more ideas which are either unnecessarily "academic" or so reductive as to be humorous. Castagno doesn't seem to understand that the theatre is a fundamentally pragmatic art form -- he ends up trying to explain far too many things which are self-evident if you don't view them through the distorting lens of postmodern literary and cultural theory. Why do Jenkin and Wellman, for instance, use various levels of language? Not because they're trying to prove a theory of Bakhtin's, but rather because it's fun. Anyone who has seen a good production of a Len Jenkin play knows that it is first and foremost a lot of fun. Castagno is like an analyzer of comedy who is more interested in trying to explain how jokes work than in simply enjoying that they do.

The fundamental premise of the book is, in many ways, false. These are not new strategies -- most are variations on ancient strategies, and the most radical can be traced back to the early modernists (Gertrude Stein's plays are more radical than any mentioned in the book) -- the plays mentioned are, rather, new manifestations of strategies which have been around for quite a while. The idea that the writers discussed are the theatrical version of the Language Poets is also flawed -- though Wellman and others certainly value language and use it in a different way from more traditional playwrights, there are so many other elements to even the most basic theatrical production that "language playwrights" is a misnomer.

For someone who proclaims to know so much about "new" strategies, Castagno seems amazingly ignorant of a lot of current theatre -- the playwrights he discusses are all ones he apparently met at a conference. For a book such as this to ignore the techniques of writers like David Greenspan and Erik Ehn, to mention only two, is a tremendous shortcoming. Another problem is Castagno's strong desire to apparently create rules and guidelines for what is or isn't "new", which leads him to miss the most interesting thing about contemporary theatre: the grey areas. Writers use whatever techniques meet their needs, and this has led "traditional" writers to try various innovative techniques and writers known as "experimental" to write plays which are more or less traditional. In his haste to label and box the works he discusses, Castagno frequently simplifies magnificently complex writings.

At the moment, this is the only book which really looks at playwrighting from a perspective other than the tired and cliched tenets of what Mac Wellman calls "geezer theatre". I hope that more books for playwrights will explore innovative writing techniques with a bit more subtlety and nuance than this book achieves, but for the moment this is all there is. With any luck, some actual playwrights will soon decide to publish their own books. Perhaps the best thing to do right now is not to read this book, but rather to read the plays themselves.

Rating:
Summary: A necessary but mediocre book
Review: I have completely mixed feelings about this book. Part of me wants to celebrate anyone who brings more attention to writers such as Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, and Suzan-Lori Parks -- some of the most exciting playwrights in America -- but another part of me is deeply uncomfortable with the clunky, jargon-filled sentences and often obtuse ideas herein.

The best element of this book is the exercises sprinkled through each chapter. In fact, it's tempting to say: Get the book for the exercises, read nothing else. They won't make you a great playwright, but they will get you thinking about the possibilities of the theatre in ways that no other handbook will.

There are some good ideas within the text itself, too, but there are far more ideas which are either unnecessarily "academic" or so reductive as to be humorous. Castagno doesn't seem to understand that the theatre is a fundamentally pragmatic art form -- he ends up trying to explain far too many things which are self-evident if you don't view them through the distorting lens of postmodern literary and cultural theory. Why do Jenkin and Wellman, for instance, use various levels of language? Not because they're trying to prove a theory of Bakhtin's, but rather because it's fun. Anyone who has seen a good production of a Len Jenkin play knows that it is first and foremost a lot of fun. Castagno is like an analyzer of comedy who is more interested in trying to explain how jokes work than in simply enjoying that they do.

The fundamental premise of the book is, in many ways, false. These are not new strategies -- most are variations on ancient strategies, and the most radical can be traced back to the early modernists (Gertrude Stein's plays are more radical than any mentioned in the book) -- the plays mentioned are, rather, new manifestations of strategies which have been around for quite a while. The idea that the writers discussed are the theatrical version of the Language Poets is also flawed -- though Wellman and others certainly value language and use it in a different way from more traditional playwrights, there are so many other elements to even the most basic theatrical production that "language playwrights" is a misnomer.

For someone who proclaims to know so much about "new" strategies, Castagno seems amazingly ignorant of a lot of current theatre -- the playwrights he discusses are all ones he apparently met at a conference. For a book such as this to ignore the techniques of writers like David Greenspan and Erik Ehn, to mention only two, is a tremendous shortcoming. Another problem is Castagno's strong desire to apparently create rules and guidelines for what is or isn't "new", which leads him to miss the most interesting thing about contemporary theatre: the grey areas. Writers use whatever techniques meet their needs, and this has led "traditional" writers to try various innovative techniques and writers known as "experimental" to write plays which are more or less traditional. In his haste to label and box the works he discusses, Castagno frequently simplifies magnificently complex writings.

At the moment, this is the only book which really looks at playwrighting from a perspective other than the tired and cliched tenets of what Mac Wellman calls "geezer theatre". I hope that more books for playwrights will explore innovative writing techniques with a bit more subtlety and nuance than this book achieves, but for the moment this is all there is. With any luck, some actual playwrights will soon decide to publish their own books. Perhaps the best thing to do right now is not to read this book, but rather to read the plays themselves.

Rating:
Summary: Useful but Slanted
Review: Okay, let's clarify the title. "New Playwriting Strategies" does not mean "New Strategies for Playwriting." It means strategies for what author Paul C. Castagno calls "New Playwriting." What an awful name. Like "New Math," "New Left," and "New Jersey," it's a title that will quickly age and become its own worst parody. Unfortunately, the techniques described in this book risk following the same path.

Castagno starts with an overview of the philosophy of the Russian Formalist critics, and goes into how the writings of the playwrights he profiles have supported this philosophy. Then he tells the reader to imitate this pattern. This is putting the cart before the horse--criticism follows literature, not vice versa. An author seeking to emulate a critic's view of what literature should be is bound to create a ho-hum piece. The author also spends a lot of time on an armload of technical terms introduced early in the book. I fear for this kind of by-the-numbers writing, as it will inevitably produce a disspirited final product. And why must the same narrow handful of playwrights get the nod for use as examples? Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman in particular keep coming up often. What's the deal with this near-religious fervor for such a small number of writers?

On the other hand, the book is broken up with a few useful exercises, which shift the emphasis from the theories Castagno wants to propound, into the arena of practice. Most of the exercises won't produce anything that will actually be useful in your play, but they'll help you cultivate a creative mindset outside the commercial realism favored by too many.

The strategies in this book aren't actually new. Many were used by classical greats like Shakespeare and Sophocles, and they enjoyed a renewed popularity in the 20th century, due in part to the late writings of August Strindburg. However, they're not widely used in America, and perhaps this book will give some of them the better airing they deserve.

You'll have to work around Castagno's demeaning attitude to playwrights who don't use the techniques he espouses. His condescencion to realism, to integrated characters, and to linear narrative are almost self-parodizing. Many good playwrights pick and choose, sometimes going more realistic and sometimes less, and that includes many of the playwrights Castagno favors in this book.

This is not the best possible book on the playwriting techniques described herein. However, it's the only one out there right now. Most of the playwrights who use the style Castagno describes eschew writing books of theory, so it may be a while before a better book comes out. Until then, using this book with a clear head and careful hand will help break down the walls that may surround you as they surround most of us.

Rating:
Summary: Useful but Slanted
Review: Okay, let's clarify the title. "New Playwriting Strategies" does not mean "New Strategies for Playwriting." It means strategies for what author Paul C. Castagno calls "New Playwriting." What an awful name. Like "New Math," "New Left," and "New Jersey," it's a title that will quickly age and become its own worst parody. Unfortunately, the techniques described in this book risk following the same path.

Castagno starts with an overview of the philosophy of the Russian Formalist critics, and goes into how the writings of the playwrights he profiles have supported this philosophy. Then he tells the reader to imitate this pattern. This is putting the cart before the horse--criticism follows literature, not vice versa. An author seeking to emulate a critic's view of what literature should be is bound to create a ho-hum piece. The author also spends a lot of time on an armload of technical terms introduced early in the book. I fear for this kind of by-the-numbers writing, as it will inevitably produce a disspirited final product. And why must the same narrow handful of playwrights get the nod for use as examples? Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman in particular keep coming up often. What's the deal with this near-religious fervor for such a small number of writers?

On the other hand, the book is broken up with a few useful exercises, which shift the emphasis from the theories Castagno wants to propound, into the arena of practice. Most of the exercises won't produce anything that will actually be useful in your play, but they'll help you cultivate a creative mindset outside the commercial realism favored by too many.

The strategies in this book aren't actually new. Many were used by classical greats like Shakespeare and Sophocles, and they enjoyed a renewed popularity in the 20th century, due in part to the late writings of August Strindburg. However, they're not widely used in America, and perhaps this book will give some of them the better airing they deserve.

You'll have to work around Castagno's demeaning attitude to playwrights who don't use the techniques he espouses. His condescencion to realism, to integrated characters, and to linear narrative are almost self-parodizing. Many good playwrights pick and choose, sometimes going more realistic and sometimes less, and that includes many of the playwrights Castagno favors in this book.

This is not the best possible book on the playwriting techniques described herein. However, it's the only one out there right now. Most of the playwrights who use the style Castagno describes eschew writing books of theory, so it may be a while before a better book comes out. Until then, using this book with a clear head and careful hand will help break down the walls that may surround you as they surround most of us.

Rating:
Summary: It's about time someone wrote this book.
Review: The arts landscape is changing; the vitality and relevance of theatrical forms is in flux; exciting new theater is evolving.

Paul Castango's book emphasises the essential element of theater that still remains its strength, the relevance of language. Through thoughtful examples that include a wide range of writers and styles, the book effectively and efficiently examines the best of the new experiments in creating and expanding theatrical forms.

This book has opened new levels of understanding and examination to my own work as a writer. I am a better playwright for having read it.

Rating:
Summary: Freeing Your Script
Review: Words that stop on a dime to shift the beat of an action, characters that transform at the turn of a phrase from the sublime to the grotesque, and nouns that seemingly have no connection to each other building to provide landscapes of character, thought, and actions. These are just a few of the exercises and ideas contained within this extremely useful book.

While the joy of writing maybe the first and foremost concern of the playwrights (Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, etc.) that Castagno uses as models in the text, it is a joy arrived at through rigorous thought and discipline. And it is this rigor of intellect along with a strong sense of theatricality that informs this book. Because in an era where many new plays bear a greater resemblance to fleshed out sitcoms or television dramas, Castagno presents strategies that remind writers of the possibilities and opportunities that writing for the stage offers over evening television. Succinctly, Castagno's book reminds the playwright that words are the ultimate weapon of choice.

The book can easily serve not only a playwrighting text for both a beginning or more advanced class but also is a useful tool for an individual writer looking for ways to make his or her text breathe free of the constraints of the traditional well made play. From a first-hand standpoint, these techniques, along with the intellectual thought that informs them, provided the final step in my development as a playwright. Furthermore, I utilized the exercises for a workshop I taught at Tulane University this summer (in conjunction with a play I was having produced) and saw immediate results.