It happens every few weeks or so, at least once a semester and definitely more than once a month. One of the scriptwriters in one of my workshops has brought in pages to read and they look like this:
STAGE BARE. MAYBE A CHEST OF DRAWERS SOMEPLACE NOT TOO NOTICEABLE. ALICE ENTERS SHABBILY DRESSED. SHE'S HUMMING A TUNE OF SOME SORT.
A: Hey, Idiots! You're all still here?
L: Yeah. What you gonna do about it?
etc etc.
Or maybe they look more like proper Dramatists Guild modern script formatting with one lone and glaring exception; the writer has chosen one element among the elements we expect to see on these pages -- stage directions, character names, dialogue, parentheticals. etc. -- and has given this familiar member of the family a new way of appearing on the page. Perhaps they've decided that ALL CAPS is not enough, they need ALL CAPS AND BOLD or ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALIC or ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALIC AND PURPLE.
When I was in grad school for Music Composition occasionally one of us would bring in pages of a new masterpiece that didn't look like normal music notation. 99% of the time, whatever strange visual we were taking time to explain and debate was referring to a way of making sound that was not new. Just the approach to notating it was. One of my professors Martin Boykan enjoyed such moments immensely.
His point (which he was uniquely adept at making again and again with each new notation experiment and each time in a uniquely original and entertaining way) was simply this: Sure you can probably direct your creative energy toward giving birth to some wholly original form of music notation, but in the end music is just organized sound, organized by the human brain in a way that directly communicates with the human heart and since the dawn of time and long after we all have departed this earth the same basic elements of sound will be available to us for this purpose: pitch, attack, duration, volume and timbre. You can call your newly invented symbol "Rolando Teco's Brand New Super Duper Duper Short Short Shortest Note" but you and I know everyone else will be translating that string of words into one they've known since they started piano lessons in 4th grade: staccato.
Why not do your music a favor and stick to notational symbols every musician on the planet already knows. In the end your original music will thank you for it.
So, back my scriptwriting workshops. Playwrights and some screenwriters are fond of referring to their scripts as blueprints. A script is a blueprint is something we hear all the time. And of course it's true. No play is really a play without actors and audience. At most, it's someone's suggestion of how it would go if it were performed.
For this reason, the way the words are laid out on the page has evolved into what we commonly refer to as (in the case of live theatre) Dramatists Guild Modern Play Format or (for film and television) Standard Screenplay Format. Who is this formatting for then? Well, all the people who come between you and your brilliant vision and its full realization before an audience: directors, producers, designers and above all, actors. Actors of course are the ones we should consider first, middle and last because in the messy business of touching the hearts and minds of your audience, no collaborator has more power than the actor. We look at them up there (on stage or screen) and we see a reflection of ourselves and the complicated confusing and infinitely fascinating business of getting through this thing called life. If your idea is going to stick to me, become a part of me, it must be conveyed by an actor who convinces me of the realness of their portrayal. It must be an actor who is so skilled that their performance of your script causes us to forget from time to time that we're watching something artificially born. that we're watching a work of art rather than simply life unfolding before us.
The way you choose to arrange the words on the page is always either doing one of these two things:
helping the actor to arrive at the most natural believable and recognizably human performance possible
or
distracting the actor from the content of the scene by forcing them to interpret an obstacle course of formatting idiosyncrasies which threaten to pull the whole story crashing down around them in a heap of ash.
When I read a new play written by a playwright at home in the theatre I feel it immediately. Certainly by the middle of page one. How is this possible? Because the person writing the script I've got in my hands is clearly imagining a play for the stage and employing all the elements that communicate to us most vividly in the theatre: dialogue, acting, the way the actors move through the physical space, the way the storytelling moves through time, the way the dialogue sounds, etc. etc.
Your play is a thing that has not yet become.
It's your vision encapsulated in words on a page and pages in a binder or a PDF on someone's hard drive. The characters, their lives, their struggles, failures, burdens, confusions and pain are there somewhere inside those pages waiting to be borne in front of an audience. But assembly not included. They must be put together by actors et al.
Just as you want to give your story the best shot possible with the actors who are cast to bring those characters to life, you ought to give us, your colleagues who read your work aloud in workshop, the best shot of understanding your intention as well. And of course there's one more person who would benefit tremendously from more clear choices of formatting your pages.
You.
As you continue on the journey of editing your masterpiece you, too, are not immune to the distraction of distracting notation. Get it right from day one. Get your formatting right and the characters alive in your head will breathe a sigh of relief. You just may have saved them from a slow asphyxiation.
Do your play a favor. Write it the way you want it to play. Always.
