The Human Side

Following Sunday’s reading (more mug than saucer, I'm faking posh with this photo) I’ve got a bunch of new ideas - things to try, things to cut, things to improve.  It’s hard work, but good work.

I find it very useful to read through the script with a single thing in mind - being in Joe’s head, being in Tom’s head – do their actions and intentions all make sense? 

Then I swap the character hat for the god/writer hat: is every line active?  I’m trying to make sure the characters never do anything without trying to affect the other.  This will hopefully go some way to keeping Dad’s Money human. But there's more to it than that.

I watched a play tonight where, towards the end, two characters delivered monologues about the traumatic experiences they’ve been through.  They were very, very bad experiences - but they didn't move me.  The story involved some potentially very dramatic events, but the play consisted mostly of dualogues where the characters argued very directly over the facts at issue in the scene, so we never saw the human consequences.  It got boring.

Was it boring because the story was boring?  I don’t think so.  Macbeth would be boring if we just saw moral debates on the murders.  We don’t – Shakespeare shows us both the incitements to the killings, and the effects of the deaths on the perpetrators, the deceased’s family, on the entire kingdom.  That’s the good stuff.

It’s the same reason we want to see the weeping family on the news.  It’s the same reason the WAGs are in the paper.  It’s the same reason we gossip.  And it’s obvious we lap this stuff up, but it’s not always obvious when it’s missing from a script.

I’m going to head back to my play and read through again, digging as deep as I can into the human side.