AMERICAN DRAM A

HSC TOPIC: STUDIES IN DRAMA AND THEATRE

WORKSHOP TRANSCRIPT
DI RECTOR TANYA GOLDBERG
PERFORMERS JOSEF BER, RYAN HAYWOOD, ELLA SCOTT LYNCH AND ELOISE OXER
STAGE MANAGER SARAH SMITH
THEATRE TECHNI CI AN SIMON ROBINSON
2 & 3 April 2007
Wharf 2, Sy dney Theatr e Company

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AMERICAN DRAMA WORKSHOP

Hello. My name is Tanya, Im a director. These actors are Josef, Ryan, Ella and Eloise. Well be
your guides for the next hour or so as we explore some of the terrain of 20th Century American
Drama. Its a pretty big landscape and were only going to cover a small portion of it, but we hope
itll be enough to give you some insights and whet your curiosity for more.
At the end well have some time for questions and discussion. When we get to the Q&A, Im going
to be asking you specifically about what images or ideas which strike you the most, from the
scenes we present. And also, Im really interested in your impressions of the representation of
women in the scenes we present, and what ideas you come up with about how the relationships
between men and women are depicted in American Drama.
So lets get going with a scene from SPEED THE PLOW by David Mamet, written in 1988. David
Mamet was born in 1947 and is not only a prolific playwright but also a screenwriter, essayist, and
theatre and film director.
SPEED THE PLOW is set in a Hollywood film studio. Fox, played by Ryan and Gould, played by
Josef, are two studio executives who have worked together for the past 11 years, doing deals,
making movies, making money. Gould has just climbed up a rung on the corporate ladder and the
day before the play starts, he has been made Head of Production. The new position means that he
has the power to greenlight a script, to say: yes, the studio will turn this into a movie. The day the
play starts, Fox has been given an unexpected opportunity: a hot-shot director has agreed to work
on a script about a prison break-out and has given him 24 hours to work up the deal. So Fox has
brought the project to Gould, who in his new position as Head Of Production in Act One has said
hell greenlight it. Now, in Act Three, he tells Fox that he has changed his mind
I want you to look and listen out for a couple of things:
- have a look at the way women are presented, and
- listen to the language, to how the words are put together and come out of the characters mouths.
Scene 1: SPEED THE PLOW by David Mamet
This scene is a good indicator of Mamets concerns as a writer. His subject matter explores the
myths of capitalism and the loss of that spiritual confidence underpinning both individual identity
and American national enterprise. Like many of the great playwrights before him, Mamet is dealing
with the underside, the underbelly of the American dream.
A lot of Mamets characters are salesmen or con-men, tricksters, characters who rely on words to
create a story, a fabrication which out of need becomes a kind of truth which will give their lives
meaning.
You might call him cynical but its useful to remember the social context Mamet is writing in. He
began writing in the 1970s, in the decade
- after the assassination of President Kennedy,

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after Vietnam War had turned, from a commitment to defend any friend and fight any foe,
into a squalid war with a huge death toll and a great national, spiritual toll,
- after the political idealism of the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution of the 60s
- and during which Richard Nixons Presidency was brought down over the Watergate
scandal, showing Americans that their elected leaders can betray them.
America, you could say, had lost its innocence. Self-interest, self-exploration and decadence were
the new values.
-

Through the particular, specific dramatic situations he sets up, Mamet writes about this spiritual
decay, this moral dislocation and sense of alienation and betrayal.
The first and third act of SPEED THE PLOW takes place in Goulds office. Even though its the
office of the Head of Production of a massive film studio in Hollywood, it is full of boxes, it is not
complete but only partly-formed. Already, before any characters have spoken a word, the audience
is presented with an image of a world thats not quite right, a world which is ill-formed or somehow
broken.
So even though the world of the play seems naturalistic, Mamet is employing very specific
symbols to communicate key ideas. Hollywood itself is a symbol of both extreme corruption and
extreme success. The characters are driven by empty materialism, sexuality is reduced to currency
but at the same time, as we saw in the scene just now, the characters also have an irrepressible
energy and wild inventiveness. In the scene we performed, you get to see just how inventive Fox
has to be, how many different strategies he has to exploit, from pleading, to brute force, to clever
rhetoric, to taking a big risk, in order to change Goulds mind.
The other important thing to note about Mamets writing is his use of language. Im sure you
noticed that it seems very naturalistic, in that it replicates the way people speak in real life but
actually, his language is very stylised.
Lets take a quick look at one section of text from the scene we just performed.
Ill get Ryan to read the line only according to the grammar, exactly the way the words are laid
down on the page.
(emphasis on the italics and capitals otherwise totally plain)
FOX: Huh. ( Pause.) Because, um, you know, I had the package, Doug
gave me one day, Doug Brown gave me one day to have the package, I
could have, I could have took the thing across the street, you know that?
Walked right across the street, As People Do In This Town, and Id done
it yesterday , Id been the Executive Producer of a Doug Brown film.
Yesterday. Yesterday.
The content of what Fox is saying there could be paraphrased as:
Huh. Because, the deal was mine for one day. I could have taken it to another studio to get
it made, like other people in this town would have done, and I would now be the Executive
Producer of a Doug Brown film.

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But he doesnt say what he means so directly, does, he? Through the use of italics and capitals
and repetition, the playwright is giving us not only clues for emphasis but is revealing something
about the characters state of mind.
Lets hear it again, this time also adding the all-important American accent that Mamet is writing
for.

Ryan repeats text in character.

As soon as you start to decode the lines and read them aloud, you discover, as we did in the
rehearsal room, that they adhere to a very strict rhythm that is particular to an American voice, and
that they are full of clues for performance, interpretation and meaning.
The dialogue is fragmented, incomplete, the syntax is broken so it reads like bad grammar, but
Mamet is using language as a device to illustrate his concerns about what else is broken and
incomplete our spirit, our psyche.
But where does David Mamet come from? Where do his concerns as a writer sit within the legacy
of American Drama?
When you go back through the work of all of Americas great modern playwrights, you start to see
that he sits firmly in a strong tradition of playwrights who are all, in their own ways,
- exploring how the soul is the human quality put under most pressure by modern societies,
- exploring the damage to ones spirit that results from living a life where meaning is
grounded in desire, in what we want, in what we long for.
- Playwrights who understand that the drive to possess, to own, to have is a key element of
American life, and that how Americans succeed and fail at fulfilling that drive is where the
pressure and damage lies.
That tradition includes Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and the father of modern American
Drama, Eugene ONeill.
Eugene ONeill was born into the theatre, he was actually born in a Broadway hotel room. His
father was a famous stage actor and as a boy, ONeill went on national tours with his father. So he
was steeped in the mainstream, popular, entertaining theatre of the day.
From those beginnings, ONeill became the most important American playwright of the twentieth
century. His plays transformed the face of American drama and you can trace his influences in
every playwright who follows, in Thorton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepherd
and David Mamet.
So what did ONeill do that was so radical? He took the prevailing conventions of European theatre
and completely shook them up. He is responsible for many theatrical innovations, things that we
are used to seeing onstage today and take for granted, are directly inherited from ONeills plays.

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As a writer, ONeill was absolutely fearless. He

- wrote modern versions of Greek tragedy,
- used devices of classic theatre like soliloquy and mask, in a contemporary context
- wrote epic plays that required theatres to allow for dinner breaks so that his audiences
wouldnt pass out from hunger or fatigue. (In THE ICEMAN COMETH, ONeill set out to
write a play where, at the end of it, the audience feels as though they know the souls of the
characters who appear as well as if youd read a play about each of them and there are
17 characters in that play!)
- was the first playwright to write a lead role for a black actor, in THE EMPEROR JONES,
- the first to exploit the theatrical tool of sound design in his writing, again in THE
EMPEROR JONES.
- He was the first playwright to put American voices, American vernacular on stage. ONeill
wrote in the characters voice, the way the character would speak. So he writes in dialect
which is designed to be heard.
If youve sat down and tried to read DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS to yourself like a book,
youll discover that it is practically impossible, that in order to make sense of it you have to
read it aloud. Every word is written phonetically. So the word pretty is written p-u-r-t-y.
And as we know now, that kind of writing is a debt that David Mamet owes to Eugene
ONeill.
- was also the first playwright to break traditional conventions of staging, by bringing both
the interior and exterior on stage at the same time and moving the action fluidly between
them.
- And his settings are full of potent symbolism.
DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS is a tragedy of obsession and inevitability which ONeill wrote in
1924. Set in a New England farm in 1850, the play shows a conflict between a father, Ephraim
Cabot, and his son, Eben which is complicated when the father marries the beautiful and
headstrong Abbie. Abbies first line in the play Its purty purty! I cant blieve its rally mine
establishes her as a dangerous rival to both of them. To ensure her dominance, Abbie makes
Ephraim promise to leave the farm to her child if she bears him one, then seduces Eben to produce
the child. But in the process she falls in love with Eben, leading to devastating consequences.
The play is set on the barren farm, both in and outside of the house, which is the poisonous symbol
of possession, the one thing that Eben, Abbie and Ephraim all want to control for themselves. And
looming above the house are these great elm trees which hang oppressively over the house,
almost smothering it. We know the farm is barren because of the dramatic imagery of the rocks
that cover the barren farm, and the stone walls and fences which are built from them. The story
draws on ancient Greek classics like Phaedra, Medea and Oedipus and those plays themes of
incest, infanticide and fateful retribution
This is a short scene from DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS. Pay attention to the dialect. And watch
again for the way women are presented, through the character of Abbie. Lets take a look.
Scene 2: DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS by Eugene ONeill.
And you thought SPEED THE PLOW required a big energy!

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Its sparseness of style and full-bore emotional honesty made DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS a
powerful and highly acclaimed tragedy when it was first performed.
There was another playwright who saw that play and was impressed by it, as well as by the great
classical works that it is inspired by, but who felt that those plays failed to present life as it really is.
He found that he couldnt believe in these works, that he couldnt say of them: yes, these works
are showing me how things really are, the truth, what I have always known, without being fully
aware of it till now.
Im talking about Thornton Wilder. Thornton Wilder was born in 1897 and started writing when he
was still at school. He was a novelist as well as playwright, and a teacher.
And he was an idealist. Also reacting to the prevailing style of mainstream theatre (which was 19th
century, European drawing-room theatre), he didnt believe that theatre should be merely
entertainment or a soothing diversion. He believed that theatre was something to participate in, that
audiences should bring as much to it as the actors, designers and director do. He wanted to write
plays in which you, as the audience, had to participate with your imagination and your heart.
OUR TOWN, written in 1938, is set in a fictional town in New Hampshire called Grovers Corners.
The play details the interactions of the citizens of the town over a 13 year period, but it focuses on
two characters, George Gibbs, a doctors son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the newspaper
editor. At the start of the play, George and Emily are children who live next door to each other and
are in the same class at school.
OUR TOWN is the most frequently produced play by any American playwright.
Wilders approach with OUR TOWN was to deconstruct the existing theatrical techniques for
representing both time and place. He felt that a play which set out to recreate a setting exactly as it
appears in real life was giving the audience too many easy answers in trying to be real. He
noticed that in Shakespeares plays, for example, there was no requirement to realistically recreate
a palace or a court-room or a battlefield, that the players and the audience do that together,
because the theatre inspires our collective imagination.
So OUR TOWN is not set in Grovers Corners, it is actually set in a theatre, in which a stage
manager brings to life the story of the everyday lives of people living in a Grovers Corners. This
device of the stage manager allows Wilder to dispense with literal depictions of time and place. The
stage manager can go backwards and forwards in time, he sets up the action, comments on it and
steps in to play some of the characters.
I said that Thornton Wilder was an idealist. He really believed in what is fundamentally good about
America and ordinary life. In a way his plays embody simple American ideals and explore the idea
that what is most precious in life is right under our noses: honesty, affection, time with our loved
ones. That real value is found in the little things.

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These ordinary events are deliberately set against the magnitude of time and place. Some of the
words which recur the most in the play are words of magnitude, the words hundreds, thousands
and millions, against which the small details of George and Emilys everyday lives play out.
In the text of OUR TOWN ladders are famously used to suggest the upstairs bedrooms of George
and Emily, because Wilder didnt believe in the need for big set pieces. But in our scene, and in the
spirit of the playwrights intentions, were using whats readily available and are going with two
stools. Lets have a look at a short scene from OUR TOWN.
Scene 3: OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder
George and Emily are an iconic pair. From this point in the play we see them as teenagers who fall
in love, get married and build a life together. They present another template of the relationship
between men and women which has been hugely influential. The template of American
sweethearts. This is where the legacy of the boy and girl next door comes from. Its a legacy
which still survives today. You can recognise the template in everything from TV shows like
HAPPY DAYS to movies like AMERICAN BEAUTY. Im sure you can think of some more
examples.
Tennessee Williams is a playwright who wrote about another version of American life. He grew up
watching plays like OUR TOWN and adopted in his own writing a willingness to experiment with
space and time, but used those breaks with convention in different ways and to explore quite
different concerns.
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is one of the great plays of 20th century American drama. It was
written in 1947 and won Tennessee Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It has inspired a movie,
a ballet, an opera, a TV-version and a musical parody in an episode of The Simpsons.
STREETCAR deals with a culture clash between two symbolic characters, Blanche DuBoisa
pretentious, fading relic of the Old Southand Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial,
inner-city immigrant class.
Blanche is a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture are an illusion she
presents, to shield others, but most of all, herself from her reality.
Blanche arrives at the house of her sister Stella Kowalski in the French Quarter of New Orleans,
where the seamy, multicultural ambience is a shock to Blanche's nerves.
Like Eugene ONeill, the sets of Tennessee Williams plays are charged with a symbolic function. In
STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, it is the enclosing space of Stella and Stanleys tiny, two-room flat,
where Blanche finds herself, having nowhere else to go.
Lets take a look:
Scene 4: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE , Scene One, by Tennessee Williams
From the beginning, STREETCAR presents very dense, complex relationships. Stella and Blanche
are so different, with energies that work in counter-point. And into that mix, Williams introduces the
character of Stanley who, in contrast to the self-effacing Stella and the charming refinement of
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Blanche, is a force of nature; primal, brutish and sensual. As the play unfolds we watch how all of
these complex layers of character move and shift against each other in a fascinating game of
power and defeat.
As well as these intricate, layered relationships, STREETCAR is a play that also explores with
great complexity the ideas we talked about with SPEED THE PLOW, the notions of reality VS
make-believe, of the need for storytelling and fabrications, the need to construct realities in order to
make life liveable.
Blanche explains that she has lost her ancestral southern plantation home which is called Belle
Reve. Translated from French, Belle Reve means beautiful dream.
Williams said of himself that he wrote plays to create imaginary worlds that he could retreat into
from the real world, and his plays are peopled with characters like Blanche, who have terrible
difficulty reconciling their internal world with the reality of the world around them.
Again its useful to remember the personal social context in which Tennssee Williams wrote. He
lived in a time when homosexuality was illegal. It was absolutely unacknowledged in public figures
and in public life. In some states of the U.S., being gay attracted severe penalties. So Tennessee
Williams had to spend much of his life lying about his true identity, and would have felt both
threatened and marginalised by that social environment.
In Blanche we see a character who is pressed to the margins of social concern, and trapped in
ever-diminishing social space. She is a character who also creates worlds that she can retreat into,
and spins circles of denial around the truth of her situation. She is an unmarried woman
approaching a certain age at a time when there were few real options for women.
So what choices are available to Blanche? She has to somehow make these new circumstances
work but as well see in this next scene, which takes place after Stanleys drunken poker night, she
is starting to have serious second thoughts and is desperate to create some other options for
herself.
Scene 5: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE , Scene Four
We start to see how locked in her internal world Blanche is, how impossible it is for Blanche to see
what Stellas life might be like from Stellas point of view, when Blanche is as motivated as she is
by self-preservation.
And it might seem that Blanche is being melodramatic when she says Ill take to the streets but
when we consider her few options for survival, we can see how Blanche could view that as a
genuine compromise that she might have to make. And if that is a real option for her, no wonder
she clutches even tighter to her constructed fantasies, using the make-believe for survival.
The plays builds its energy and intensity towards Scene 10. Its the second last scene of the play
and it is often referred to as the rape scene. Tennessee Williams was very conscious, as a writer,

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of pleasing his audience. And in 1949, it would have been taboo for the scene to have been
construed as anything other than a rape.
Lets take a look at Scene 10, in that light.
Scene 6: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE , Scene Ten, version 1
Well, thats one way to do it and it seems to make sense of the text, right? But it is only one reading
of the play. A reading whereby Blanche is considered a victim. But if you read a lot of commentary
about the play and you see that Blanche is just as frequently described as a nymphomaniac.
The truth most probably lies somewhere in between.
Lets consider some more of the complexities at work in the play.
An intensity of energy zings between Stanley and Blanche from the first time they appear on stage
together. There is an undeniable sexual tension. And we know that Blanche is at a point of last
resort, that if she cant make life work here, then her options are truly terrible.
She tries desperately to deny the looming possibility of things not working out. We see throughout
the play that Blanche resists the pull of time, terrified at the first signs of aging. She is painfully
aware that something has ended and that it can only be recovered at the level of story, through
role-play and fantasy and ultimately, even that cannot save her.
So what happens if, in Scene 10, when Stanley so easily cuts through all of her pretence about the
wire, he takes away Blanches ability to cling to the make-believe story of redemption she has
cooked up for herself. If thats true, then Blanche might realise that her only true option for survival
is to somehow destroy Stella and Stanleys relationship. Not only because it threatens to eject her
from her last place of refuge but because to do so will turn back the clock to Belle Reve, to the
beautiful dream before the horrors of the real world intruded.
Blanche is powerfully attracted to Stanleys social crudeness and masculine directness, which she
simultaneously despises. And Stanley is fascinated by Blanches qualities of aristocratic arrogance
and neurotic sexuality which he also holds in contempt.
What happens if we play the scene again, with this information present in our minds and this time
acknowledge Blanches complicity in seducing Stanley as another strategy for survival?
Have a look.
Scene 7: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE , Scene Ten, version 2.
[ all actors onstage now for Q and A]
So, What do you think?
Does the text still make sense?

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Which version do you think worked best and why?

These are the kinds of questions that we tackle on the rehearsal room floor, and that as a director,
you need to make decisions about as youre crafting any production of a play.
So Im curious were there any images or ideas that made a particular impact and if so, why?
And what about the way women are depicted in the plays that weve looked at? Is there anything
that you notice about that?
We have some time for questions now, so please, ask away.

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