A sampling from plays currently in the seasons of regional theatres, ranging from an American classic to recent premieres David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Believing in racial stereotypes will blind you to reality Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles A heavy price was paid by women who were the professional career path-makers and breakers of the 1970's Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart It's a crime not to follow your heart's desires Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Overly sensitive people are crippled by the lies of the world we live in Michael Hollinger’s Opus Staying together emotionally is even harder than playing together harmoniously Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County Parents who can’t release their children create havoc in their lives Most playwrights express their themes with considerable subtlety That's the difference between having a theme and a message If your primary goal is get across a message, there are probably more effective ways of doing that than writing a play, though one of the attractions of docudramas is that they can carry a significant message with ease Cautions on Writing from a Theme Nearly all contemporary playwrights would say it’s a fool’s errand to try writing a play driven consciously by a predetermined theme or message But it can be tempting to try Doing this seems especially intriguing since it can be argued that Shakespeare did it with his political tragedies (Hamlet and Macbeth among them) and his history plays, probably to help support the monarchy that allowed his theatre company to operate If the Bard could make this work, why not try The poster-boy for why this practically never works is the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, one of the major dramatists of the 20th century He tried writing from a theme in most of his great plays including his masterpieces, Mother Courage and Her Children and Galileo One of the liabilities he had in attempting this was the misfortune to create such compelling characters that they obscured his intended messages, but those characters were only part of the problem The main obstacle for Brecht is that a playwright’s real themes those deeply held and integrated personal values always end up being infused into the play whether they want them there or not As those values enter the play, they overwhelm and finally bury any consciously intended themes Brecht’s overriding personal values the way he lived his entire life centered on a belief that wily survival skills were essential in the world It’s no surprise that his major plays have title characters incorporating that same belief toward living and survival In Mother Courage, he wanted us to take away the message that the title character was a stupid woman who never learned that the loss of her children and her own near ruin was being caused by her pursuit of capitalist ideas That intended theme was overwhelmed for audiences by Brecht’s internalized theme: They always saw Mother Courage as a wily survivor fighting to make it against nearly impossible odds Instead of seeing her as stupid, audiences always saw her as worthy of admiration Despite reworking the ending of Mother Courage in subsequent years to make his intended theme clearer for audiences, he could never get it to break through his internalized theme Best Practice: For messages to work in plays, they need to coincide with your deeply held values.
A second danger in writing from a theme is that it can lead to unconsciously manipulating characters and plots to make the point rather than allowing the conflict between the characters to logically drive the play The artificiality that nearly always results from this risks turning off audiences, primarily because the logic of the play’s climax and resolution won’t make sense to them The best approach with themes is to allow them to flow naturally into the play as you write Since it is nearly impossible to prevent your personal values from flowing into a play it makes sense to just let this process happen.
