The Problems of a Playwright in an Atheistic Age

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A satirical comedy opens our eyes to ourselves and our society, and in laughing at our foibles, foolishness, and failures, we will also see the serious side, the dangerous implications of our idiocy.

In Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, the character Betty Higden compliments her child Sloppy who reads the newspaper to her. She says, “And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices.” T.S. Eliot chose Betty’s quip about Sloppy as a subtitle for two sections of The Waste Land—a detail that fell to Ezra Pound’s ruthless red pen.

Eliot’s ear for voices and the natural rhythms and color of vernacular speech gave his poetry some of the grit and glamor that enlivens his work. It would play out later in his accomplishments as a dramatist. Being the Eliot fan that I am—and having a gift for “doing different voices”—I have been drawn recently to attempt some writing for the stage.

This has led me to ponder the problems of a playwright in an atheistic age. I first began to wrestle with these questions when I left the Anglican Church. Having stepped away from a vocation and livelihood and, with a young family to support, I embarked on the unlikely career of screenwriter. I reckoned films were the place where stories were told in our society and wanted to engage in that dimension of storytelling. My training and experience in the field (I landed a job as script consultant and producer at a small video production company) complimented my college degree in speech and English, and it was a fascinating (if ultimately unsuccessful) foray into the world of filmmaking.

One of the benefits was to hone my writing skills—which helped as the opportunities for freelance writing and authoring books on the Catholic faith began to open up. Now some twenty years later, it seems to me that, faced with the predominance of the screen, stage drama is a neglected art form, and I’ve been drawn to the challenges and opportunities live drama presents.

The opportunities of stage plays (over screen plays) are numerous and obvious: It is cheaper to produce a stage play. A stage play, once done, can be repeated again and again with a renewed immediacy and urgency. A movie is once and done. A stage play can be produced in a range of ways—with an extravagant staging or a simple table reading. A stage play, once done, can be adapted, edited, and improved. Each new production of a stage play will be transformed in an interesting way, depending on the creativity of the actors, the director, the stage manager, and the context and audience of the production.

With all these strengths and opportunities, what are the particular problems facing a Christian playwright in an atheistic age?

Firstly, a Christian writer will invariably wish to “get his message across.” However, it is vital to avoid theme-driven stories. Audiences can whiff an intrusive theme a mile away, and no matter what the message—be it political, religious, ideological, or just sentimental mush—they will instinctively recoil. If the audience wants a sermon, they will go to church. They come to the theater to be entertained, enlightened, and inspired. This is not a bad thing because the experience of dramatic storytelling can communicate the “message” in ways a sermon cannot.

The Christian dramatist’s faith and values must be incarnated in the story, characters and plot line. They must be hidden in the story as the Son of God was hidden in the stage set and drama of first century Palestine.

Most any genre can carry a good story, but when contemplating the problem of Christians writing to a secular audience, C.S. Lewis pointed out that science and fantasy fiction allows one to creep past the “watchful dragons” of secular censorship. Considering this dragon-like bias, how might a Christian writer approach the challenge of stage drama?

While Lewis’ use of fantasy and science fiction is apt, I think comedy and satire can also be added to the sneakers one might wear to creep past those watchful dragons. The genius of comedy and satire is that, for it to succeed, it must be based in truth. We laugh at ourselves when we see ourselves for what we truly are. The word “Humor” echoes the word “Humility,” which derives from “Humus,” meaning earth. Good comedy is therefore humble and down to earth.

A satirical comedy opens our eyes to ourselves and our society, and in laughing at our foibles, foolishness, and failures, we will also see the serious side, the dangerous implications of our idiocy.

The classic masks symbolizing the dramatist’s art are comedy and tragedy, and both have existed in balance from antiquity. Tragedy takes us on a journey of terror, tyranny, hubris, and humiliation, while comedy takes us on a journey of laughter, lightness, pitfalls, and pratfalls. However, the crucial aspect that binds comedy and tragedy together is that both reveal our human condition. Both reveal our weakness and fallibility. In tragedy we mourn and fear our condition. In comedy we laugh and mock our weaknesses. In the end, both comedy and tragedy (like all art) rely on the power of emotion more than the intellect.

This is a tricky business for we are taught to be wary of those who manipulate our emotions. The politician or the preacher who tugs too hard on our heart strings is rejected as a poor propagandist. We’re not dumb. The advertiser or the entertainer who mangles the manipulation of emotion is instinctively shunned.

Comedy, however, is rarely suspect. Laughter warms us up. Our defenses fall when we laugh. The court jester can tell the king anything and get away with it. Many a truth is spoken in jest, but many a heart is also opened through well placed wit. Touching the emotions is one of the ways to motivate and move the audience. Indeed “emotion,” “motivate,” and “move” are all rooted in the Latin movere.

My screenwriting tutor commented on the power of emotion to communicate truth, “I want to move the audience so intensely that they leave the theater thinking.” The writer of a successful comedy might add, “I want to make the audience laugh so hard that they leave the theater thinking.”

Dwight Longenecker’s first play Aconite and Church Lace is waiting in the wings.

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The featured image is “Portrait of Domenica Morghen as Tragedy and Maddalena Volpato as Comedy (Tragedy and Comedy)” (1791), by Angelica Kauffmann, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.