The Inside and Outside of Playwriting
To order Two Ways, contact the Publisher here.
“This book is like having John in your corner, rooting for you, cheering on your successes, reassuring you when you fail, and reminding you that what you are doing isn’t easy – but it’s worth it!”
From the Foreword by Kevin Loring, Governor-General’s-Award-winning playwright and first Artistic Director, Indigenous Section, National Arts Centre, Ottawa
“Warm, funny, and written with such love for the artform, Two Ways About It offers practical guidance for the emerging playwright and a welcome refresher for the seasoned practitioner. Loaded with insight into both craft and process.”
– Kevin Kerr, Head of the Writing program at the University of Victoria and Governor-General’s-Award-winning playwright
“John Lazarus’s method for playwriting is practical and brilliant. Using his simple and innovative techniques you will see a story and dialogue for your play emerge.”
– Tracey Erin Smith, Creator/Host of award-winning TV Series Drag Heals
On his retirement from Queen’s in 2021, John took his 31 years’ worth of lecture notes and began transforming them into his book Two Ways About It, which explains each of these “two ways” in detail: explaining why your characters won’t invent your story for you, how to construct a plot using cause-and-effect, how to refine your dialogue for the actors by chewing on it yourself first, and numerous other techniques.
The book also guides the reader through other aspects of the profession – from current issues around creativity, originality and cultural appropriation, to nuts-and-bolts concerns like script submissions, workshops, readings, rehearsals and opening nights.
Two Ways About It: The Inside and Outside of Playwriting, by John Lazarus, edited by Glenda MacFarlane, was published in October 2023 by J. Gordon Shillingford Publishers of Winnipeg. Look for it on line or at your local bookstore.
Excerpts from Two Ways About It
A Word to the Absurdists
As mentioned earlier, this book may appear to teach conventional playwriting. So here’s a clarification for the avant-garde / surrealist / Theatre-of-the-Absurd fans.
In 1896 Paris, a writer named Alfred Jarry invented this kind of theatre, with an obscene parody of Macbeth called Ubu Roi (King Ubu) that began a tradition of cutting-edge, avant-garde, irrational theatre which has gone through several mutations and labels, including Surrealism, Theatre of the Absurd, The New Playwriting and In-Yer-Face Theatre. Nowadays it overlaps with Performance Art.
I do admire those who can do the kind of work that began with Jarry, and I enjoy a lot of it very much, even though it’s not my own forte as a playwright. However, I maintain that however dreamlike and surreal the theatre that you create, it will almost certainly be helped by an active plot or plots. Theatre leads the audience through the story, and I believe that the ideal is to keep them wanting to know what happens next.
So even if your ambition is to write the next Absurdist or Post-Dramatic masterpiece(s), I hope you’ll find useful stuff in here – if only because the better you understand the rules, the more creatively you can bend or break them. And with that, Absurdists, I respectfully invite you to read on.
Theme vs. Message
This passage comes at the end of a section urging the reader to focus on writing plays that explore themes, rather than that dictate “messages” on how we should live.
Let’s look at four of the most famous plays ever written as if they were message plays, designed to teach us how to behave if we’re ever in the protagonist’s situation:
If Hamlet has a message, it is that if a supernatural creature comes to you and asks you to go kill the King, go right downstairs and kill the King. Don’t wander around the castle pretending you’re crazy, scaring your girl friend, putting on plays and yelling at your mother – just go kill the King. Because if you wait too long, then a lot of other people – namely your mother, your girl friend, your girl friend’s father, your girl friend’s brother, two guys you went to school with, and you – will die as well.
The message of Macbeth is that if supernatural creatures come to you and imply that you might want to kill the King, don’t do it. It’s a trap.
If A Midsummer-Night’s Dream has a message, it is, don’t go into the woods at night, because there are fairies. Fairies are real, they are dangerous, amoral and powerful, and they’re liable to mess with your head – in Nick Bottom’s case, literally. Beware of fairies!
The message of The Merry Wives of Windsor is: don’t be an idiot, there’s no such thing as fairies, and if people know you believe in them, everybody in town will laugh at you.
[Footnote: To be fair, that last one’s a bit of a stretch. The real message of Merry Wives is, if you want to seduce two different people, find out if they’re friends and don’t send them the same love letter. Of the messages offered here, this one stands the best chance of being of some practical use.]
Success, Part 1: How good you are is none of your business
Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art. – Andy Warhol
What great ones do, the less will prattle of. – Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, Sc. 2
What job is it of mine to go around wondering what other people’s perceptions are? I have enough, dealing with my own. – Keith Richards, My Life as a Rolling Stone, Ep. 2
We never find out how good we are. There are plenty of unreliable guides. In school you are graded, and given or denied prizes; in the profession, you get good or bad reviews, awards or snubs, money or unemployment. It’s easy to be affected by these indicators. Someone congratulates you on your latest work and you feel like a success; a website publishes a list of important playwrights and you’re not on it, and you feel invisible. Both feelings are illusory. Such indicators don’t define your value in the world.
History is full of people hugely successful in their own lifetimes and subsequently gone from public consciousness. It is also full of apparent failures who became renowned and revered after their deaths.
Our opinions of ourselves seem to have no predictable correlation to what others think of us. The solution is, of course, to try to ignore both the responses of others and your own self-assessment. Best to concentrate on continuing – and finding joy in – the work.
The fact that you will never know how good you are at your art form is probably a blessing, because how good you are is none of your business.
Success, Part 2: Their success is your success
If you can’t control your own success, you can control the success of other artists even less, so you might as well be a good sport and decide that their success is also your success. We may chuckle with rueful recognition at Gore Vidal’s famously bitchy line, “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail” – we’ve probably all felt that way at one time or another – but in fact we’re better off seeing our fellow playwrights not as rivals but as colleagues in our community.
My attitude about this was formed in the 1970s, when all Canadian playwrights struggled together for respect and recognition. When George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe opened in Washington, D.C. in 1973, New York Times critic Julius Novick wrote in his review, “‘Canadian playwright.’ The words seem a little incongruous together, like ‘Panamanian hockey-player,’ almost, or ‘Lebanese fur-trapper.’” In the face of such condescension we simply had to band together and support each other. Despite a change in that attitude among foreign critics, the intervening decades have provided no reason to revise that attitude. Cheering on your colleagues not only takes the sting out of seeing a fellow playwright enjoying a big hit when your latest masterpiece is going uproduced, but also helps keep you humble when you get a hit of your own.