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Bettencourt Replies: First of all, thank you for your kind comments and your intelligent response. I think you make an important distinction between the script as produced and the script as published/read. For instance, a director may completely ignore Eugene O'Neill's extensive character and stage directions in producing a play, but a reader would certainly benefit by them as an aid to imagining what O'Neill imagined as he wrote the play. In this sense, extensive documentation of the playwright's thought process, whether through character biographies or stage directions, is completely appropriate for the script considered as published literature.
My "beef" is with playwrights who rely upon up-front "biographizing" (if I may coin a word) as a kind of pre-perusal mind massage for the reader -- a prejudicing of sorts. They can certainly have in their heads all the character clues and cues they want as they write -- but those have to be embedded in the writing and extracted by the acting and directing because that is all audience members are ever going to have to rely upon, not being to avail themselves of the pre-perusal-mind-massage benefits of a written script to follow. And, more often than not, I find that the mini-bios promise more than the scripts deliver, so that the character descriptions become something of a Platonic ideal that is only approximately realized in the script's coarser reality.
Ultimately, though, my suggestion about using short character descriptions, if any, is really based on a argument about a freedom to write blindly and without an approved destination in mind. Perhaps it is only with American playwrights (and certainly not all of them), but the focus on character is often a focus on psychology -- that all stage-character behavior must be rooted in something explainable and traceable so that audience members are never confronted with behavior that can't be made transparent -- in other words, human impulses defanged and domesticated.
But characters are not people -- they are stage creations, artifices, inhabiting a space created by four walls, a floor, and a ceiling which is itself stocked with the machinery of artifice. If a playwright, from the start, wants his or her main female character to be in her mid-30s but concerned about her biological clock ticking and works at a job that promises more than it delivers and that because of this frustration is not sure whether to choose career or family -- and says all of this right up front as the complete working premise -- then the playwright has just boxed in his or her writing. The play then has to become something about that, which forecloses possibilities of discovery and even treachery by characters and the story. Instead, audiences get a kind of programmatic unveiling, replete with revelation and reversal and "upping the stakes" and the whole quiver of script-writing tricks that drive the action toward the fore-ordained destination of "resolution."
But if the characters are not treated as "people" but as stage-works, and this is demonstrated by simply a name-tag and a function, then the writer, I think, leaves himself or herself open to authentic discovery, which can only enliven the script and, looking further down the road, the work of the future directors and actors who (God and artistic directors willing) get a chance to bring it to life. (A writer I admire a great deal, the British playwright Howard Barker, always works from this approach -- if you haven't read his work, you may want to check it out.) The drive for psychological transparency and consistency can blandify the writing process and may, in the end, give the audience less a true picture of reality than a minstrel show of the confected realities (otherwise known as stereotypes) that we've imbibed from the media deluge in our culture.
That, anyway, is how I'm thinking about it today. Thank you again for your gently provocative thoughts and for supporting Scene4. read the column