I’ve read through all of the dialogues and honestly I’m not sure what was happening in many of them because I have not read most of the plays that they were taken from. Unlike monologues, dialog has to do with context. Characters do not immediately tell you who they are, what their intentions are and what they are feeling at any given moment. All of this is shown through the conversational tactics of the character and the actor. These characters do not tell you what they are doing, or what they are trying to do. They are not reflecting on an event or telling their perspective or ideas about something that has happened in the past. They are living the action with the audience as if it is being said for the first time. Dialogue must be naturalistic from a conversational standpoint. For example, in Closer by Patrick Marber, there is an interesting progression of the conversation between Larry and Anna. The segment of the play begins when they are happy together, but then it jumps to a time where Larry travels a lot and Anna has been sleeping with Dan for a year. At this point in the play Dan has already told us that he has been sleeping with Anna. Because the audience already knows this, we understand Anna’s attitude toward Larry when he comes home from the business trip. She does not have to tell us that she loves Dan because we already know this from earlier scenes. I think it is important for playwrights to use foreshadowing and give the audience an omniscient perspective in order to be able to understand both the history of the characters and the things that the characters themselves don’t know about yet at various points through out the play.
The play I am the most familiar with that is in this selection of Dialogues is Angels in America. After reading, analyzing and performing segments from this play last year in Geoff Proehl’s Dionysus class, I found this play invigoration for its intense subject matter, unique characters and extremely sad story. Because I am familiar with this script I was able to understand the context from which this segment was taken. From a playwright’s standpoint, characters have to reveal things to each other through conversation. Harper assumes that Joe is a homosexual, and shows him she is angry with him through passive aggressive statements. “Not my dinner. My dinner was fine. Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched it til it turned black. It’s still hot. Very hot. Want it? When speaking with another individual in a play, a character does not need to say straight out what they mean. When writing, you have to take into context of what exactly characters would say if this was a first time conversation and the actors didn’t know the ending to the play. When caught in the heat of the moment whether angry or happy, characters are not going to be able to get right to the point. Like any real argument, in Angels, they are stubborn, passive aggressive. Even in Henry the IV, where Shakespeare has a tendency to have the characters exclaim their feelings right out, there exquisite cleverness in the interaction between Hotspur and Prince Henry. The characters are playing each other in a game of power. “Nor shall it, Harry; for the hour is come/To end the one of us; and would to God/Thy name in arms were now as great as mine!”.
In dialogue I feel that characters have to be more realistic than in monologues. Emotions should not be directly stated, but instead should be reflected in the statements that they make and the actions that they take. Dialogue must also have a forward movement. Unless used to make a point, the dialogue from the plays that we have read do not have a lot of circular repetitious movement. Even in the arguments, the conversations have an obvious build, climax and resolution.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting Rachel. What do you mean characters in dialogue have to be more realistic than in monologues? How so?
ReplyDeleteYou've got competing ideas here, and difficultly, they're both right. Dialogue needs to sound realistic. AND dialogue must communicate everything we need to know in this play. This is often hard to reconcile. For instance, as you point out, people often lie. They lie or refuse to say what they mean or evade truth or act passive-aggressively. And real people rarely set the scene for us. So as a writer, you have to figure out how to plant all the ideas the audience needs to understand what's going in. And only a relatively small percentage of them are going to be outright stated by a character on stage.
You point to a good example in Closer. We know what's going on from a previous scene. Good trick. What else? How do we know Joe is gay when neither he nor Harper will say so out loud? How do we know whether Harper is angry or crazy, whether her frustration is legit or misplaced, whether Joe knows what she's talking about or is really clueless? Acting/directing is one answer certainly. But it's not the big one -- certainly Angels can stand on its own as a written text. So it's worth nailing down (actually underlining) how plays you like communicate this information to you.
I'm not sure about dialogue having to be naturalistic, Shakespeare, in fact, was all about committing the beauty of his poetic verse to his audience. At the time of writing many of his plays, people were just beginning to see English as a valid and beautiful language worth studying in detail and worth writing about. Shakespeare began that. Although, and it's hypocritical of me, for us meagre non-Shakespeareans(dont I wish!) it's difficult to write non naturalistic dialogue without ending up sounding like a bunch of robots talking to each other. Although, that in itself could be used to make a point... hm.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree with your assertion about characters, when they're upset, not being able to get right to the point. No one ever gets to the point when talking in this day and age, it's just the name of the game or you're talking to someone you know extremely well and it's a more cheerful rather than sad conversation. One of my favorite things about Angels in America(which blew my mind as well :)) was what wasn't said. Harper couldn't say the word homosexual in that dialogue section we wrote, Ray talks about it in part 2(I haven't read part one, unfortunately) but doesn't ever come out and say it. It's beautiful, and I think capturing the power of linguistic confusion is the mark of a truly wonderful writer.
Yep... understanding dialogue relies so much on what has already happened. The idea, I guess, of "planting seeds." The back knowledge from previous scenes hold many of those seeds, like your example from Closer.
ReplyDeleteThe ambiguity of conversation and meaning is one of the joys in dialogue. I guess it can be in monologues too, but dialogue more so. The passive agressive motives, the denial of a fact, or the evading actions used to avoid it can all show information beyond the words of the dialogue.
You make a good point about needing to know the qualities of a first-time conversation when writing dialogue. We have to understand that conversations in dialogue involve both a common knowledge of previous experiences and a curiosity for new information. With that in mind, we can figure out how characters might know (or might not know) how to engage or disengage from one another while talking. Familiarity between characters will keep an audience at ease; unfamiliarity will keep an audience in suspense.
ReplyDelete